Sevil Tunaboylu

Sevil Tunaboylu (b. 1982, Istanbul) creates a space of translation from painting to sculpture by transporting her subjects across various media as a form of research. Her practice often includes exercises in the adjacency of found objects and portraits that remain outside the frame—present only through their traces.

Tunaboylu graduated from the Painting Department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 2005. Between 2008 and 2010, she co-directed the non-profit initiative Mtaär Open Art Space, which she also co-founded. Since 2017, she has been a member of the feminist collective Alaca Heyheyler, through which she organizes exhibitions and produces artist publications. She has been teaching visual arts since 2007 and continues to live and work in Istanbul.

Recent exhibitions include the group shows to carry at the 16th Sharjah Biennial (UAE, 2025), Painting Today (YKY, Istanbul, 2024), and Atlas of Women (DEPO, Istanbul, 2024), her solo exhibitions include Apprentice (400&amp,118, Istanbul, 2023) and Embarked on an Everlasting Return (DEPO, Istanbul, 2020).

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Sevil Tunaboylu has recently been focusing on migration and the contexts in which the craftsmanship transmitted through migration can be addressed, as well as themes such as ghosts, restlessness and assuming life. The paintings, sculptures and installations she creates from a personal point with respect to contemporary archaeological practices can be considered as gestures that resist the ways of living imposed by society and the environment through semi-fictional interventions.

Upon the invitation of 400×118 initiative at İMÇ last year, Tunaboylu exhibited her work Apprentice that was based on a story she wrote about her grandfather and father continuing the carpentry craft they learned in Skopje after migrating to Istanbul. In the same vein, the artist continued to follow the traces of this craft passed down through generations in the light of various historical sources and personal memory in the Nested Corrosion publication and the Remainder installation she conceived for the 16th Sharjah Biennial, which opened during her residency at SAHA Studio.

In this context, Tunaboylu presents a series of works that she constructed by incorporating archival and oral findings from her trip to Skopje during the SAHA Studio term into her personal history, which she now considers to be verging on fiction: In a historical interval starting from the 1950s, various references such as those which were carried along during the migration, the unspoken stories, a door that has been ingrained to her mind since childhood, come together in an installation of oil paintings and sculptures. These works are accompanied by a publication that she shows as a sketch spread on the walls of the space.