Betül Aksu’s work explores how boundaries appear in everyday life, focusing on the role of language within bureaucratic and geopolitical contexts. Through installation, performance, text, video, and print, she examines language as both a tool of control and a means of resistance. Her practice combines personal exploration with archival and fictional narratives to critically investigate the relationship between identity and the systems that govern movement and access. Central to her work is the exploration of how bureaucratic structures shape perceptions of freedom, belonging, and identity.
Her approach critically examines how language functions within institutional frameworks, particularly how it reinforces systems that limit access and participation. She delves into how immigration policies, official documents, and regulations create barriers to movement and inclusion, while also challenging these systems by reimagining the role of language. Her work encourages a rethinking of how language can serve as a space for resistance and new forms of connection.
Betül Aksu has participated in the SAHA Studio residency, 2024, in Istanbul, the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, 2023–2024, at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, the Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Programme at IKSV, 2022, and the School of Commons Research Residency 2021–2022. In 2023, she founded sezon, an independent art space in Izmir dedicated to exploring the politics and poetics of change. Her recent solo exhibitions include Permessus at AVTO, Istanbul, 2024, and hold, place, transfer, repeat at Material, Zurich, 2024.
Visit Betül Aksu’s website here
May 2025 – joining the Dwell Here Research Intensive Week from 14 – 20 May 2025
Research Focus
Betül Aksu has proposed to spend time extending the questions of fictional and physical places that enable free movement and right to work in that place. As part of her research at IMMA she’ll spend time in sited physical spaces to search for remnants of Permessus, an ancient site with no clear boundary and history, to elaborate on possible changes of built legacies.
Dwell Here offers participants a simple proposition: to commit to this time and place while thinking deeply about its urgencies. Together we are curious to learn what can be activated or challenged through the process of dwelling. IMMA encourages reflection across the following themes to consider geographical, historical, political and cultural concepts of Ireland as a starting point to expand and connect international contexts through similarities and differences:
Technologies of Peace – to consider commemorative landscapes and memories of peace (as a dream, movement, or value) while generating perspectives on sustainable coexistence.
The Irish Paradigm – Welcomes artistic research that creates intimacy and connections, while celebrating the perceived agility and freedoms of operating on the periphery. As a small island on the edge of Europe, Ireland often has a challenging relationship with ‘the centre’.
The Museum as a Site of Vibration – consider how the museum and site can create new vibrations and rhythms within the built legacy of empire. How can museums make visible cultural shifts, including erased, censored or marginalised histories, as well as sustainability, planetary care, sharing and hospitality.