Meli Rumeysa Öztürk completed her bachelor's degree at Yıldız Technical University, Faculty of Art and Design, Department of Art and Culture Management. She continues her Combined Arts o at the same faculty.
Her work is concerned with spatial memory, social archiving practices and our relationship with the collective memory. She creates new narratives by inspecting historical and public spaces, analyzing the accumulated traces at the level of materiality and meaning.
Questioning the effects of temporal and spatial dynamics on memory, the artist develops a language that creates a layering distance through techniques such as site-specific installations, dyeing with natural pigments, weaving and digital counter-mapping practices. The methods she chooses decipher the physical and complexly layered texture of individual and collective memory, offering alternative narratives to the viewer. Through archiving practices, she creates indirect layers that are understood ironically and progressively through processes such as erasure, preservation and anonymization. She adopts, in parallel with the research practice she uses in her work, the methods that enable her to question ‘historical and cultural accumulation’, allowing it to give rise to new conceptual areas.
Öztürk's practice invites the viewer to question the transparency, accessibility and semantic depth of the act of archiving. She proposes new paradigms for the mutual methodologies of transmitting historical and cultural accumulation into the future and explores pseudo-archival possibilities.
She has published an e-mail newsletter called Meli'den Public Günce (2023 - 2024, 12 issues) in which she shares her work and creative process. The archive, which is also a material in itself that she focuses on her artworks, becomes an archival format that is produced through this e-mail newsletter.
She was a participant in the [Plug-In-Plug-Out] program (2024) organized by 5-5, a research space on art and equalization. She was the art director of the performance Find a Suitable Hole to Start (2024) at çakSTUDYO. She also conducted a research study within the scope of the Memory Journey Program (2024) organized by the Karakutu Association, and is currently working as a narrator within the program.
Öztürk lives and works in Istanbul.
