“Perspective is not an attempt to conquer the world but rather and attempt to create an oasis within it”
-Federico Campagna
Is life just a free fall through time?
During which, it’s all about the space we are given
which defines the space we can take?
The universe within us
Which defines how we interact with the one around us.
Pre-Islamic Turkic people believed the universe to be a Yurt made to protect humankind from the world of the “Spirits”.
And in accompaniment of this belief, they saw the Yurts that they lived in as a smaller Universes in their own right.
But playing with the overwhelm of scattered fragments,
Impossible would it be to grasp the whole.
Or even to control the fall.
So to discover such combinations,
Which make reality, truly stranger than fiction
Is something else all together.
In movement and strife
Whatever blooms becomes of us
So imagine who would we be
Having forgotten all we worry for
Would we still be, us?
Or something different altogether?
Perhaps, art was never something we made
But rather something we discovered, in the universes we made
This universe here, is for you to discover.
Home might be hard to come by.
But a Yurt can be wherever you make it.
Asûde Alkaya is a Prague-based artist and art director, born in Istanbul 20 days before the 1999 earthquake that shook her country. The slow settling of the dust in the 23 years that followed placed her in a perfect chasm of experiences and instability, building the foundation of her practice, which is based around the values of empathy, courage and humility in the midst of chaos beyond the control of single individuals.
In her practice, collaboration is seen as an open invitation to explore and connect with the world and each other in a space of safety and understanding. What binds sûde to her work is her faith that by using her art and her capabilities, she can serve causes close to her heart in new and creative ways, creating space for empathy to connect distant experiences through these curated spaces.
Her work, while being rooted in her painting practice that accompanied her through the years of meaning making attempts, finds its strength in a multi-disciplinary approach into life and manifests itself in many mediums, from sculpture, writing and music to organization, curation and space-making.