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PORTFOLIO

Embodiment of writing/searching for meaning

Bio

Öykü Özoğul (b. Nicosia, Cyprus) is a transdisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores themes of identity, displacement, language, and healing. Growing up on a divided island shaped by unresolved conflict and complex histories, she became deeply attuned to the "in-between"—between nations, languages, cultures, and personal truths.

Her early years were marked by daily crossings through border checkpoints and UN buffer zones, a lived experience that continues to inform her practice and sense of self. She began her studies in Fine Art at the University of Nicosia (2017–2021), where questions of belonging, collective memory, and structural trauma began to emerge in her visual and written work.

In 2022, she moved to the Netherlands to pursue a Master’s in Fine Art at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, which she completed in June 2024. Her current work is process-oriented and research-driven, drawing on automatic writing, somatic awareness, and collaborative methods. She sees art as a site of open documentation and embodied inquiry—an evolving space where personal and collective healing can unfold.

Statement

Currently researching about the decoloniality, exclusivity of experiences, therefore sensations/senses on healing and trauma work, addressing the minorities as well as people who were othered and how the ‘’authenticity’’ is missing from the daily life in an oppressed society within the contemporaneity. She is in a stage in her research where self-reflection is taking place as automatic writings and sensual abstractions in the form of paintings and performative gestures through ‘’publicly/openly’’ and physically, documenting this process which in return creates interactions with the audience as well as a grounded analytic connection to herself, which is intended to be a part of the documentation process. The documentation process is also referred to as ‘’Somatic Mappings’’.  Since this mapping is referred to the long-forgotten feelings/senses of the body and how to actively talk from nearby delving with the perspective of the masses on the minority groups suffering from ‘’identity’’ crisis-loss of listening. First of all do you remember how to listen to yourself? What’s your stagnancy, your in-between space?

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