Özlem Altın, “Untitled (positive self)”, 2025

archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 305 gsm
40 x 26,5 cm (image size) / 42 x 29,7 cm (paper size)
Edition of 20

Donation price 400 euro

This photograph comes from a rediscovered roll of film and was shot around two decades ago in the ethnographic museum of Berlin. It shows the back of a small Buddha statue and its reflection, capturing a moment of stillness and presence.

Özlem Altın is an artist, mother, and somatic practitioner. In her paintings, collages, photographs, and artist books she explores the body at rest and the inanimate in action. In her work, Altın draws from a photographic collection she has assembled over the years, combining found images with her own photographs to form dense constellations. By finding connections between layers of photomontage and ink, the artist challenges viewers to develop new narratives by “acknowledging what is happening in between the images.” Some elements and motifs—like the mask, the mermaid, the heron—are symbols that she frequently returns to. They embody something part human and part animal, and a state of in-betweenness. Her complex net of images contributes to elaborating a narrative, at times mythological, on bodily existence.

Özlem Altın lives and works in Berlin. She received her MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2006. From 2020 to 2021, she was a visiting professor of photography at HGB Leipzig, and in 2023, she taught at the UMPRUM Visiting Artist Studio in Prague.