Merve Tuna
Merve Tuna (b. 1984, Eskişehir) completed her BSc at Istanbul Technical University Product Design Department in 2006, and her MA in Womenswear Fashion Design and Technology Department at London College of Fashion in 2010. Tuna’s work is object-oriented and narrative-based centering around the concepts that relate to the body. Situated at the confluence of psychoanalysis, mathematics, and film, her artistic process oscillates between rigorous formulation and material-based instinctive making. She explores how the concepts of trauma, pain, shame and power relations are embodied and manifested in objects, the tactile parallels between craft processes and psychosexuality, and the insights subject-object relations can provide into the human psyche.
In 2021 she held her first solo show The Case of O: Scenes, Formulations, Derivations at Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hammam. Since 2022, Tuna has been developing The Fleeting Subject, a body of work she further expanded during her residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in the summer of 2024, exploring new narrative forms and material experimentation.
The Fleeting Subject
During the SAHA Studio program, Merve Tuna continues to develop her ongoing project The Fleeting Subject, which explores how the loss of a childhood transitional object may affect adult perception of the body and adult relations. Drawing from psychoanalysis and incorporating a mathematical approach, she renders the void created by this loss as negative space, countering the body as positive space. Through this exploration, Tuna examines how reconciliation with loss might be suggested through sculptural forms, investigating the psychosexual aspects of objects, materials, and craft processes. For the final SAHA Studio presentation, this research transforms: rather than a single body reconciled with loss or void, multiple bodies dismembered, layered and incomplete—emerge. Employing mediums that include drawing, marbling and sculpting, Tuna pursues the fleeting nature of the subject. The Studio space becomes a kind of playground for fragmented forms: torsos, limbs, and joints made of various materials and found objects. These parts act as impossible puzzles—pieces that strive to complete one another yet never form a whole or resolve into one body.
This process leads to a central question: In terms of bodily self-perception and the human psyche, what is the relationship between loss and dismemberment?
