Through a half-open door, Deniz Gül’s studio conveys the essence of space as the arch-material of all things. An inner-city dwelling amid the globalized hustle of downtown Istanbul, it is less a home than a shelter that gives life meaning and fosters creative inquiry. Working beside the same monstera plant for the last decade, next to a desk, a sofa, and a mattress, and within eyeshot of a minaret and Italianate apartments, Gül approaches the symbioses of space and material through interpersonal dialogue, embodying the potency of emptiness as grounds for acts of production and installation, speculation, and recollection. Theirs is the art of emphasizing the unapparent and abstracting noetic and spatial absences with investigatory wit into orders of literary and postmodern female-centric constructivism. Later that day, when a friend drops by and inquires after Gül’s work, they reply “empty,” with a characteristic smile, somewhere between philosophic solemnity and comic bewilderment.

Gül was trained as a conceptual artist under Belgian-Turkish artist Selim Birsel and arts practitioner Erdağ Aksel at Sabancı University and it was there that they gained a perspicacious vision for dialogue, articulating their ideas between the working-class makers of Istanbul’s industrial manufacturers and the rarefied domain of art institution insiders. “Our classes were all dialogue and decision-making, what means what and analyzing it. It was not like a fine arts department where we had to work with our hands or paint.” Upon graduation the only way Gül knew how to access life was through dialogue.