Het WIlde Weten welcomes Zeynep Beler for the month of September 2022.

Zeynep Beler is a painter whose practice overlaps indispensably with photography, post-internet culture, and the vernacular. She is most interested in images with “no [share] value”, utilitarian or “bad” images that clutter a phone’s camera roll, as well as zooming in on minute details of photographs to reveal their fundamental particles, pixels and/or grains.

What Jaron Lanier has called “the digital flattening of expression into a global mush” extends to the technics of the body, and the haptic relationship with physical materials that turn into expression in painting. As Beler works she stays alert to how her sensibility as a painter is being steered by algorithms, using devices in which the processes of seeing, photographing, and sharing are collapsed, ultimately exploring the boundaries of painting alongside technology while continually evading becoming flattened oneself.

Currently Beler is creating a series of images, both via the lens and completely artificially, that result in something resembling photography but are more accurately actually color fields with a certain topography and affect, while also analyzing the need to collaborate with the screen and somehow break away from it altogether.

At Het Wilde Weten she will work on a series of drawings and paintings based on these and prepare a showcase of the first results for a two-week spotlight exhibition at the Kunstuitleen Rotterdam between 14-30th September.

Come see her studio during GRAW 2022.