Hazal Özgür (b. 1997) is a painter and printmaker from Istanbul, Turkey. She is currently based in New Haven, where she is pursuing an MFA in Painting/Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. Özgür has presented two solo exhibitions in Istanbul and has participated in group exhibitions in New York, New Haven, Berlin, Gaziantep, and Istanbul.

My work filters personal experience through the lens of psychoanalysis. I try to make sense of my subjecthood as it continually slips from my grasp, shifting, turning on its head, and escaping legibility. I hold on to moments when the unknowable in me briefly surfaces, glimmering like a shiny object in a dark sea, and points me toward a material, a memory and image. Through material investigation, experimentation and play, I allow a moment of clarity to map on to a form and transgress into the world of signification. Like an analyst honing in on the slip that reveals the unconscious, I try to bring what lies at the periphery into the center. 

In my practice, this gesture of recentering happens on the personal and cultural register simultaneously. Cheap commodities associated with the frivolous, juvenile and   feminine like a kiddie pool, Jello, glitter, heart-shaped pendants, and glow-in-the-dark stars, among other things make their way into my work. As I incorporate these materials into my paintings, I defamiliarize them, overriding their status as clichés and reconfiguring them from a site of superficiality to one of depth. As an ethnic minority of Circassian descent and a woman from Turkey, I think of objects in cultural margins in relation to Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: I see them as a means of reordering societal relations.

As I sift through my personal experiences, I pay attention to the moments that evoke Freud’s concept of the oceanic feeling: observing my shadow merging with the roots of a tree on the pavement, glimpsing my reflection in a car window superimposed on the world flowing past, or gazing at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my bedroom ceiling as I drift off to sleep, enveloped in warmth like a baby in the womb. These instances of being one-with-the-world become the genesis of my work, inspiring the text, form, and images I create.