Merve Çanakçı’s research-based practice explores a synthesis that aims to form intuitive, intellectual, and material connections between elements that appear to be contradictory or anomalistic upon first glance. Her conceptual building blocks include fragility, transformation, and body memory. The point of departure for her works are the moments of dissolution and reshaping that occur at the emotional, physical and existential boundaries of the individual and all living things. Undoing and disintegration do not point to an end in Çanakçı’s work, but rather to a passage that leads to new states of being.
Çanakçı’s relationship to materials is shaped by an understanding of mutuality with respect to the materials’ temporality, resistance, and memory. In her work, stitching, dismantling, combining, tearing into pieces, priming, and painting are both formal interventions and conceptual tools. Her process of production turns into an endeavor of making visible the fractures, marks and transformations that living or material beings go through.
Her works made of fabric, paint, drawings and ready-mades open up spaces of existential contemplation for the permeable, layered, and time-sensitive nature of materials. The compostable and recyclable nature of these materials mirrors the impermanence of not just the human body but of all species, their ecosystems and their materialities. Çanakçı consciously makes material decisions that make visible mutual fragility and interdependence.
She positions art as an area of research that tackles the possibilities of healing and its limitations, as well as one that accepts what cannot be healed. Rather than relying on fixed meanings, her relationship with the viewer is on an experiential area that is uncertain, empathetic, open to collective transformation, and impermanent yet dense. This felt in-betweenness in her work is the foundation of a shared ethos and existential awareness that exists somewhere between the known and the unknown.
Merve Çanakçı was born in 1982 in Ordu, Türkiye. She earned her BFA in painting at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul. She attended tapestry classes between 2002-2004 and practiced printing at Borusan Cultural Center.
Selected group and solo exhibitions include; “Megabytes Uploaded to the Cloud”, .artSümer, Istanbul, (2023); “Brain Fog”, .artSümer, Istanbul, (2022); "Love Songs", Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin, (2022); "Garten der neuen Welt: Was bin ich?", 48 Stunden Neukölln Festival, Kammer, Berlin, (2022); "Threshold" (solo), .artSümer, Istanbul, (2020); "Bank / Blank", Alte Sparkasse, Berlin, (2018), "A Room of Our Own", Ark Culture, Istanbul, 2017, “Stay With Me”, Salon für Kunstbuch at the 21er Haus – Museum of Contemporary Art, Viyana, (2016); “Stay With Me”, WOW Venue beim Kunstraum MOM, Hamburg, (2016); “Stay With Me”, DE KIJKDOOS, Amsterdam, (2016); “Stay With Me”, Weserburg-Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen, (2015); "Paper Cut" (solo), .artSümer, Istanbul, (2015); “Stay With Me”, Depo, Istanbul, (2015); "Stay with Me", Apartment Project, Berlin, (2014), "That Mood" (solo), .artSümer, Istanbul, (2012); "Point Zero", .artSümer, Istanbul, (2011); “Destroy Istanbul”, Galerie Neurotitan, Berlin, (2011); "Broken: Not Be Scattered But Expanded", .artSümer, Istanbul, (2010) and "A Dream… But Not Yours", National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., (2010) among others.
Selected performances include; "Don’tswallowtheblackhole”, Syria Passage, Istanbul, (2009), and “Blead-Leg”, Galata Perform, Istanbul, (2008).
The artist lives and works in Berlin.
