Gabrielle Moser:<\/strong> Your work is founded, above all else, in material experimentation. Your recent solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB), We Who Have Known Many Shores <\/em>(2024), included among its list of materials, for instance, ancestral lace work, magazine pages, dried okra, eggplant, and peppers, cotton string, and rose water, but also ceramics, glass and wooden beads, hand-marbled fabric, and video. You are probably best known for your works with Ebru and for learning to tuft your own carpet designs, but more recently you have expanded into messier experiments with pottery, fountains, and large-scale textiles. Has this changed your working methods as an artist to involve more collaborations with institutions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alize Zorlutuna:<\/strong> That\u2019s a good question. I think certain elements of my work, which require specialized techniques and specific contexts, have been facilitated by those institutional connections. Some of my recent work emerged out of invitations to respond to institutional collections, such as at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, where I created an installation in 2022 that included a series of carpets incorporating abstract motifs and symbols from carpets in the permanent collection (said to be from Egypt) and from Anatolian carpets, and also referencing local waterways and Ontario flora and fauna. That project led to a whole set of experiments and directions in my practice that had not had the opportunity to bloom before. So, I was offered the chance to enter into the museum\u2019s collection, and what I found there produced the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
$\"Alize$
Alize Zorlutuna<\/strong>
Bodies of water<\/em>, installation view, Art Gallery of Burlington, 2024.
Photo: Roya DelSol, courtesy of the artist
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
GM:<\/strong> This theme of resuscitating and relearning technologies that are ancient but have gone out of everyday practice is key to your work. It seems tied to the experience of diaspora: you have to return to your cultural homeland and work intensively, and then come home to Toronto and try to piece together the materials that you need to be able to continue to practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AZ:<\/strong> I think when you\u2019re in diaspora, you are always searching for belonging, searching for reflections of where you come from and how to carry that to where you are. I have always been interested in traditional material practices. As I learn them, I\u2019m drawn to consider what kinds of knowledge and wisdom are embedded in the gestures required to activate these practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GM:<\/strong> I remember you once telling me that you took up el i\u015fi<\/em> [Turkish \u00adcrocheting] in part because you were trying to memorize and \u00adre\u2011perform the gesture that your grandmother made with her hands when she was crocheting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AZ:<\/strong> Yes, for me it is about gesture and also about materiality. For example, it is a very specific alchemy that produces the effect of Ebru and allows you to manipulate it and have agency over the design. I learned from Kubilay Eralp Din\u00e7er, one of my teachers in Istanbul, for instance, that with certain colours, you need to mix them and stir them every day for a minimum of a month before using them. And certain colours behave differently with the ox gall [a bile, collected from cows, used as a wetting agent in paper marbling]. After experimenting for ten years on my own, I had so many questions about why the paint behaved the way it did, which no one in Canada could answer. So, returning to apprenticeship, spending time practising different gestures and techniques with my teacher and refining my understanding of the material alchemy, has been crucial. And then, the papers I produce become lesson plans set by the teacher that I can follow and try to replicate at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Alize$
Alize Zorlutuna<\/strong>
Becoming Disloyal<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s been interesting for me practising Ebru and trying to apply it to ceramics, which I did with my teacher at the AGB guild, Heather Kuzyk, as a process of building a relationship with failure\u200a\u2014\u200awith experimenting and not knowing what the outcome will be. That is a gift that I\u2019m carrying into all of my practice, and into my life as a whole. The preciousness of the material is such that it can take me months to build up to doing it, to have the paint ready, and then I\u2019ll just make as many as I can. And not very many of them end up being for someone else\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s very humbling. And I think it also invited a reframing of the unexpected. Not as failure, but as a driving force in how I produce work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GM:<\/strong> I want to ask a different question, which is about the role of humour in your work. In the show at the AGB, which included colonial images from National Geographic<\/em> alongside family photographs, there was this aspect of play happening by obscuring faces with different dried herbs and flowers: a refusal to give in to the viewer\u2019s desire to see. Or the word-sculpture, Beloooooooooooooooooooong <\/em>(2024), made of hand-made doilies, where the stretched-out \u201coh\u201d is very funny to imagine: the need to awkwardly purse your lips for so long to say the word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AZ: <\/strong>Playfulness is there for me, for sure. I like the idea of stretching the syllable to invite the idea of stretching in other ways. It was inspired partly by M. NourbeSe Philip\u2019s writing of the word as \u201cbe\/longing\u201d but also by Rinaldo Walcott\u2019s work on long emancipation. It\u2019s a question of how long it takes for belonging to be granted or given or felt, in Canada especially. What might it be like for us, as settlers here, to be in the long game, but also to physically stretch back through space and time: to learn this stuff, bring it back, carry it, and stretch it across continents into our present lived realities. I think about solidarity work as a kind of stretching, too. Because for those of us who have more proximity to power and privilege, we have to stretch into empathy and humanity in a way that pushes against all the training that we internalize about how to occupy space and be in relation with each other. I think about somatic stretching as a way to be in solidarity with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These fragments of embroidery that I have gathered from women in my lineage over my lifetime, which would, in another time, have become other things, attached to domestic spaces, are displaced. Here, they\u2019re out of place. And it\u2019s felt like such a diasporic gesture to string them all together to make some kind of utterance from that collection of fragments that will never become what they were meant to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Alize-Zorlutuna_atelier\"$
Photos: Farnoosh Talaee<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Alize-Zorlutuna_atelier\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
GM:<\/strong> Has there been anything in audience responses to your work that has surprised you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AZ:<\/strong> Many people have shared with me how moved they are by the work, emotionally, or how beautiful it is. I\u2019m always trying to find a way I can use poetry, to come sideways to questions of history and politics: to use feeling. In the AGB show, there\u2019s a suite of prints on Ebru that incorporate designs from kilim rugs, and the text reads, \u201cThe inconceivability \/ of a border \/ to a river \/ to a seed.\u201d When you read that, or hear that, it provokes a feeling. Because the border is an abstraction that is imposed on the land. We know it is arbitrary, but we may not feel<\/em> it. That is part of the problem with the perpetuation of colonialism and the undoing that we need to do: learning how to feel. Poetry is useful for feeling things in the body that we know in our minds. Beauty can be useful in this way, too, by offering enough safety to feel something difficult in the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It makes me think, \u201cWhat\u2019s the affect that everyone\u2019s been holding and carrying?\u201d And I think the answer is that it is the affect of white supremacy, the genocide in Palestine, and the fallout of the pandemic. And so, my work, especially the silk works with Ebru patterning that hung from the ceiling of the gallery and moved with the wind in that space, are very much an affective response to our moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, living in diaspora is about contending with a collective grief project: one that we have to undertake, being on colonized Indigenous land. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":268868,"template":"","categories":[887,883],"numeros":[7491],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[934],"artistes":[7489],"thematiques":[],"type_chronique":[510],"class_list":["post-268562","chronique","type-chronique","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-column","category-interviews","numeros-114-abstractions-en","auteurs-gabrielle-moser-en","artistes-alize-zorlutuna-en","type_chronique-atelier-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chronique\/268562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chronique"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chronique"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268562"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=268562"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=268562"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=268562"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=268562"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=268562"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=268562"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=268562"},{"taxonomy":"type_chronique","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_chronique?post=268562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}