Oyku Canli
photographer / filmmaker

Oyku Canli was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and is a photographer and filmmaker. She completed her BA in Visual and Media Arts: Film Production at Emerson College in Boston, MA, USA before attending School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to study photography. Oyku’s work focuses on ideas of family, home, belonging, and the divide between the public and the private. She is interested in exploring the documentary genre and pushing its limits.

This series “my motherland” started in the city of Giresun in the Black Sea region where Oyku’s mother is from, after she permanently returned to Turkey from the United States in 2015. It is a story that contemplates about issues of family and homeland. It traces one’s losing one’s sense of belonging and the struggle to find it again. An attempt to search for light and flow in the midst of feelings of being trapped and stagnant. All photographs are made between 2015–2017 with a large format camera and 4×5 inch color film.

Oyku Canli
photographer / filmmaker

Oyku Canli was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and is a photographer and filmmaker. She completed her BA in Visual and Media Arts: Film Production at Emerson College in Boston, MA, USA before attending School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to study photography. Oyku’s work focuses on ideas of family, home, belonging, and the divide between the public and the private. She is interested in exploring the documentary genre and pushing its limits.

This series “my motherland” started in the city of Giresun in the Black Sea region where Oyku’s mother is from, after she permanently returned to Turkey from the United States in 2015. It is a story that contemplates about issues of family and homeland. It traces one’s losing one’s sense of belonging and the struggle to find it again. An attempt to search for light and flow in the midst of feelings of being trapped and stagnant. All photographs are made between 2015–2017 with a large format camera and 4×5 inch color film.

  • Mai Ling: Not Your Ornament
    Sep 15 – Nov 12, 2023
    Secession
    Wien, Austria
    Founded in Vienna in 2019, Mai Ling is an artists’ collective and association dedicated to facilitating dialogues about experiences of racism, sexism, homophobia, and any kind of prejudgment, particularly against Asian FLINT* (women*, lesbian, inter*, non-binary, and trans*). Rooted in solidarity against patriarchal and racial discrimination, the group offers a protected space and growing network to give voice to the many individuals affected by such discrimination and foster new forms of collaboration. (more…)