Betül Aksu

Betül Aksu (b. 1990, Izmir) is an artist who explores how boundaries appear in everyday life. She focuses on the notions of familiarity, repetition and categorisation, and the influence of bureaucratic infrastructures on our relationship with movement, freedom and language. She is interested in collaborative modes of working that initiate dialogues about precarious living and working conditions in the art worlds. 

Betül Aksu holds a BA in Linguistics from Hacettepe University, an MSc in Cognitive Science from Trento University, an MSc in Language Science and Technology from Saarland University, and studied for a PhD in Media and Arts Technology at Queen Mary University of London. She was a 2023/2024 fellow within the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, participated in the Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Programme (2022) and the School of Commons Research Residency (2021-2022). In 2023, she founded sezon, an independent art space based in Izmir, Turkey set out to explore the politics and poetics of change. Her recent solo exhibitions include Permessus at AVTO (Istanbul, 2024) and hold, place, transfer ↵ repeat at Material (Zurich, 2024).

Permessus

Betül Aksu’s ongoing work Permessus examines the remnants of an ancient city with an unknown history and undefined borders. While imagining Permessus, the artist delves into the cultural, social, and political systems that normalise the concept of borders. At SAHA Studio, the artist works with a series of photographs as raw images, which were taken during her visits to ancient cities that shaped the groundwork for Permessus. The photographs depict horizontal columns that have not yet been completely excavated from the ground. Through these images, Betül Aksu embarks on an exploration of horizontally expanding, modular, changeable grounds.   

During her time at SAHA Studio, the artist works on tile forms that are found on the grounds of Permessus, using Menemen clay from Izmir as her primary material. She seeks to uncover the unknown history of Permessus through the knowledge conveyed by the test tiles and the oracle of Permessus