Sing It Back: Özlem Altin
Upcoming exhibition
Press release
For her solo exhibition at T H E P I L L ® in Paris, Özlem Altın presents a selection of new and recent works on paper and canvas that draw the viewer into a fluid, shifting space of memory, desire, and perception—an atmosphere shaped by lightness and light, by presence.
Entitled Sing It Back, the exhibition opens with a series of painterly collages on paper: large, irregular circular washes of diluted red-orange and pale peach pigment spread across the white surface, where details of anatomical photographs—an ear, a mouth, a partial face, an eye—are embedded. The bright red color operates as an environment. Diluted to translucency, it hovers between warmth and immateriality. The pigment appears to glow from within the paper, as if lit by an inner source.
Transparency becomes elevation: the color does not weigh the photographic fragment down but suspends it, as though matter were in the process of becoming light. Here, the tension between media becomes palpable. Where the photographic fragment fixes, the painterly gesture unsettles; where it anchors the image to a body, paint releases it into the atmosphere. The transparent pigment bleeds toward the fragment, forming a kind of membrane; the fragment interrupts the flow of color.
This interplay stages a subtle choreography of address. An ear suggests listening; a mouth suggests speech. Voices call and respond, dispersed across the surface, distributed between fragment and field. To “sing it back” is to respond, to receive and re-emit: a voice, life itself answering the call—not by duplication, but through modulation and transformation. Altın’s works in the exhibition play with this idea of echo: in the larger works on canvas, chromatic echoes pass from one work to another; recurring shapes answer each other by variation rather than replication. Each image “sings back” to the next, setting relations into motion.
The gestures and movements staged in these paintings produce a peculiar mirroring: a subtle yet substantial adjustment of the viewer’s perspective and perception. To look is to respond—to allow the photographic fragment to register, to be heard, to evoke a response. What yields begins to vibrate.
Sing It Back continues Altın’s exploration of the relation between the photographic and the painterly. Between them emerges a field of relation in motion, where presence is never secured, only continually re-formed—an echo passing from image to image, from surface to viewer, and back again.
Federica Bueti, in dialogue with the artist
Özlem Altın (b. 1977, Goch, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Her recent solo exhibitions include Prisma - Hannah-Hoch-Forderpreis 2024, Berlinische Galerie (Berlin, 2024); Kismet, THE PILL (Istanbul, 2022); Lens, Merano Arte (Meran, 2019); Processing, Camera Austria, (Graz, 2017); Untitled (Touch or Melancholy), Lentos, (Linz, 2016). Her work has been included in important group shows such as The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022); Tongues of Time, Villa Romana, (Florence, 2021); Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020, MoMA online (2020); Part of the Labyrinth, Göteburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (Gothenburg, 2019); The Seventh Continent, 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019); We don't need another hero, 10th Berlin Biennale (2018); Cosmology of the Boundless, Museion Bolzano (2017). Ozlem Altin was the recipient of Stiftung Kunstfonds’ Work Grant in 2022 and a Fellow at the Villa Romana, Florence, in 2020. From 2020 to 2021, she held a professorship in photography at the HGB Leipzig, and in 2023, she headed the Visiting Artist Studio at the UMPRUM Academy in Prague. In 2025, she started a guest professorship in the department of Graphic Art / Photography at HFBK Hamburg.
Federica Bueti is the author of Imagination Besieged Coloniality, Violence, and Feminism in “Mediterranean” Art and Literature (Routledge, 2025) and Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals: Voicing Dissent Across Differences (Routledge, 2022). She is a Senior lecturer at the Master's in Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute.
