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Özlem Altın

Untitled (conjoint heads)

Conjunctions and Formations of Bodies

Özlem Altın (b. Goch, 1977; lives and works in Berlin) investigates the tangled interrelationships between photography, the archive, and the body. To make her works, Altın sifts through a collection of photographic images she has assembled over many years, combining found photographs with her own and paintings in dense compositions. 

The artist’s edition, which is released in conjunction with Altın’s book Prisma, renders a found situation: two bodies nestle up to each other in the water and fuse. A piece of red acrylic glass mounted over it in the object frame transforms the black and white photograph—the found spontaneous scene—into a framed object in three dimensions that is as sensual as it is poetic. 

Özlem Altın won the Hannah Höch Förderpreis in 2024 and the Villa Romana Award in 2020. In recent years, she has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale (2022), Companion Pieces: New Photography, MoMA, New York (2020), The Seventh Continent, 16th Istanbul Biennale (2019), and We don’t need another hero, 10th Berlin Biennale (2018).