Gizem Ünlü

Gizem Ünlü (b. 1989, Istanbul) is an artist based in Istanbul. After graduating from Kadıköy Anadolu High School, she earned her BA in Painting from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 2015. She pursued her MFA studies in Plastic Arts at Yeditepe University and the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. Since 2024, she has been teaching as a visiting academic at Istanbul Technical University.

Her practice focuses on themes such as belonging, loss, mourning, vulnerability, and the thresholds between domestication and violence. She is particularly interested in the emotional, cultural, and historical resonances of everyday materials and how they can activate the collective unconscious.

Her works often unfold through installations, sculptures, video, and spatial compositions, combining material, language and performative gestures in ways that explore emotional and discursive resonances. In her practice, material and language are not separate realms but closely intertwined ways of thinking and feeling. Her process reflects both care and pain — gestures that speak to both vulnerability and endurance.