Short BIO
Beyza Durhan was born in 1992 in Ankara, Turkey. She completed her BA, MA, and PhD in Painting at Hacettepe University. For the past five years, she has been living and working in Şırnak.
Her work explores the relationships between humans, nature, and material through time-based processes and organic substances such as bioplastics and beeswax. She often collaborates with living systems and non-human actors to create fragile, process-driven installations. Durhan documents her making as a form of witnessing rather than authorship, drawing attention to decay, transformation, and coexistence. Her practice reflects on ecological thinking, posthuman futures, and the porous boundaries between bodies, species, and territories. Summarize, Durhan’s work is situated at the intersection of conceptual art, ecological materialism, and posthuman storytelling. Her works are held in various institutional and private collections.
Artist Statement
Beyza Durhan’s artistic practice is grounded in an ongoing dialogue with organic materials, environmental conditions, and the uncertainties of time. She often works with bioplastics, beeswax, soil, and botanical remnants—materials that are inherently fragile, reactive, and open to environmental influence. Rather than seeking control, she accompanies their transformations. For Durhan, making is not about mastery but about listening to the material’s own language—its cracks, dissolutions, resistances, and silent rebellions.
The geography she inhabits constantly reminds her of how political, physical, and cultural borders shape bodies, movements, and perceptions. Yet she is equally drawn to how non-human lifeforms cross, ignore, or transform these very borders. Plants do not trace national lines; bees don’t recognize fences. In her work, borders appear not only as political constructs but also as material and emotional tensions.
Durhan creates posthuman narratives—stories where humans, animals, plants, objects, and machines coexist without hierarchy. These entangled beings seek ways to think, dissolve, and transform together. Her work often moves within a non-anthropocentric framework, where material becomes both narrator and carrier. The agency, sensation, and resistance of the non-human become central to these speculative structures.
Through installations, she reflects on ecological futures, impermanent alliances, and speculative cohabitation. She treats documentation not as a separate artwork, but as a quiet mode of witnessing. The camera becomes an observer that records shifts in texture, rhythm, and temperature. Using experimental materials and embodied research, Durhan aims to generate spaces where human and non-human worlds tangle—not as metaphor, but as shared condition. Her recent projects explore living archives, collaborative decay, and matter as a vessel for memory. By working with transient, dissolvable, and unstable materials, she seeks to question permanence and embrace the slow material language of fragility.
EXHIBITIONS / PROJECTS / AWARDS
2025 7th Fragrance Festival, Halfeti
2025 Marmara University Ataturk Faculty of Education Department of Art Education, Ä°stanbul
2025 Offgrid Art Project, BeyoÄŸlu/Ä°stanbul
2024 Daire Sanat Artist Residency (Oct-Nov-Dec), Ä°stanbul
2024 AKBANK Art, 42nd Young Contemporary Art Competition Award Exhibition, Ä°stanbul
2023 BioART (w Suzanne Anker, Eduardo Kac, Dilay Koç), Haliç Kongre Center, Curated by AyÅŸe Demirci
2023 ‘KovanProject’ Odd Art Space (Tekirdag)*
2023 ‘KovanProject’ Sabancı University Kasa Gallery (Istanbul)*
2023 KovanProject’ Museum Evliyagil (Ankara)*
2023 Eskizden Piksele Dijital Sanat ve Yeni Medya, Çanakkale, Curated by AyÅŸe Demirci
2023 Sis Art Residency (Ordu)
2023 Eskizden Piksele Dijital Sanat ve Yeni Medya, Antalya
2023 Eskizden Piksele Dijital Sanat ve Yeni Medya, Capadocia
2022 “Kovan/Beehıve”, Group Exhibition, Atlas Pavilion Culturepark, Ä°zmir
2022 75th State Painting and Sculpture Competition Exhibition, Competition Exhibition Ankara State Painting and Sculpture Museum, Ankara
2022 “Pride”, Group Exhibition, Gray Area, Ayvalık
2022 “Witnesses of Common History”, Solo Exhibition, MuÄŸla Sıtkı Koçman University, KHEM, MuÄŸla
2021 “Bellows/Smoker”, Solo Exhibition, DoÄŸan TaÅŸdelen Contemporary Arts Center, Kavaklıdere, Ankara
2021 For the Love of the Bee, Ecological Awareness and Art Workshop, Interdisciplinary Collective
Studies for Social Change, Consulate General of Sweden & Nesin Art Village, Åžirince, Ä°zmir.
2021 7th Young Contemporary Art Competition Exhibition (Achievement Award), Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Tarık Zafer Tunaya Cultural Center, Şişli, İstanbul.
2019 BASE-ist 2019, Competition Exhibition, Beşiktaş- Akaretler Sıraevler, İstanbul
2019 “The Cave” Group Exhibition, Çayyolu, Ankara
2018 Ajuntament d'Algemesí, Group Exhibition, Valencia, Spain
2018 18th Şefik Bursalı Painting Competition Exhibition, Ankara
2017 30x30 Works Exhibition, Doğan Taşdelen Contemporary Arts Center, Kavaklıdere, Ankara
2016 “No:FOUR”, Group exhibition, Hacettepe University Ahmet Chest Art Gallery, Beytepe, Ankara
2016 73rd Painting and Sculpture Competition Exhibition, Trabzon
*Kovan Project Exhibitions (funded by CultureCIVIC)