Kâge; The Dream Continues as Long as You Don‘t Die / 8

Naz Işıksoy

Born in Bursa in 1995, Naz Işıksoy took her fundamental steps into art practice with art studio training that she continued until 2013. In 2019, she graduated with honors from the Department of Fashion Design in the Faculty of Applied Sciences at Istanbul Bilgi University. Developing her artistic production with an interdisciplinary approach, Işıksoy establishes intuitive transitions between different forms of expression. Her art practice encompasses painting (especially oil painting), digital manipulation, installation, sculpture, decorative design, and site-specific installations. While building her conceptual infrastructure on the axis of mythology, philosophy, identity politics, and psychoanalysis, her formal language deepens with theatrical, tactile, and intuitive layers. The artist, who has participated in various exhibitions and symposiums both domestically and on international platforms, shares her productions through her founded website, www.nazisiksoy.com. She constructs her art not so much from aesthetic concerns, but as a field of inquiry directed at the structural norms hidden behind the everyday. She aims to conflict with social structures, decipher what is seemingly ordinary, and confront the viewer with their own intellectual comfort zone. Since 2019, she has been continuing her work at her studio in Istanbul; simultaneously, she continues to carry out active projects at her production space in Gümüşlük, Bodrum. She adapts the theory of design and texture, in which she was trained and studied, onto canvas, wood, digital, and various alternative mediums. She believes that being free, unlimited, and uncontrolled in the choice of materials used provides individualization while forming the character's language. While basing her work on paradigms that are a combination of Sufism, Freud, and Tasavvuf, she defends the creation of the "self" axis—which is the combination of her philosophy and existentialism—in a mythological and spiritual language.