Özlem Altın: Prisma

Özlem Altın (*1977 in Goch) is the recipient of the State of Berlin’s Hannah Höch Förderpreis 2024. In her artistic work, Özlem Altın prefers not to be associated with any particular art medium. At the Berlinische Galerie, she has engaged in a dynamic process of collaging and photomontage to create a multifaceted, site-specific installation, in which she examines – with a strong measure of empathy – the relational fabric between photography, archive, and body.

The exhibition invites visitors to engage with the cycles of life—as a metaphor for process and change or as a reflection of the constantly evolving clockwork of the cosmos. For Özlem Altın, the body is a means of expression and a repository of knowledge at the very same time, or, as she puts it, an ‘interface for communicating, connecting, and transmitting knowledge through touch and contact’. For her multilayered installations, comprised of works ranging from large-format paintings to room-sized sculptural constellations, Özlem Altın draws on her own and found photographs from the archive she has been accruing for over two decades, with a focus on body language, gestures, and touch. Here, photography becomes an artistic material, as well as the point of departure and reference for her creative practice, for instance when she arranges pictures of hands or eyes together with other image fragments, thus creating, also through overpainting and cropping, an imaginary world of new sensory connections, calling to mind a speculative way of mapping. Here, the artist’s compositions of inner and outer pictures elude any form of clear interpretation, making ambivalence visually tangible.