DILARA KIZILDAG

Until I was almost twenty, I could not form an intimate bond with words. Visual expression opened doors for me to express myself far more fully. Growing up with visible wounds I had carried on my body since infancy, I learned to become invisible. In those years of distance between words and myself, when I avoided being seen, I still needed, like everyone else, to tell of what I saw. As the muscles with which I listened to, observed, and watched the life around me developed differently from those of others, painting became a part of me without which I could not be myself.

In a world where the female body is defined as settled, protective, and nurturing, I test the boundaries of my identity, exploring another possibility for the body on the road and in motion. In public space, I put on my armour of invisibility, choose a safe place for myself, and draw the moment I inhabit. As I draw, I look both from within and from the outside. Moments begin to expand, and time begins to flow differently. My body ceases to be an object to be looked at and becomes an instrument that listens to and reconstructs the place it occupies.

My work begins with a childlike curiosity and observation. I record what lies before me, then look for ways to tell it anew. I gather stories on my journeys and transform them on paper, building my own visual archive. From as sincere and personal a place as possible. In this sense, my work also draws nourishment from Anatolia’s oral storytelling tradition: just as every story changes each time it is told, everything I see is transformed as I draw.

The artist’s journals I have kept since 2017 have long been at the heart of this process. Each page holds a time, a place, a state of being. An archive of moments, exploring the possibilities of returning to them, of looking each time from another moment. Rather than fixing moments in these notebooks, I look for ways to see them anew. Because I change as I look; I reconstruct as I draw. I want to open a space for viewers to return to their own moment, their own curiosity, their own story.

My notebooks become travelling companions that I carry on my back for months. As my load grows heavier, the bond between the notebook and me grows stronger, so that when a notebook comes to an end, saying goodbye takes time too. As in the storytelling traditions of the East, I find myself back where I began, with a new notebook.

I fill my artist’s journals on my travels.
I make my home on the road.