Born in 1990 in Ankara, İlsu Aslan is a graduate of the Ankara Anadolu Fine Art High School. In 2009-2013, she studied Painting (BFA) at Mürteza Fidan’s atelier at the Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts. In 2017, she attended a series of workshops as part of the European Exchange Academy (EEA) Program, and participated in group exhibitions in Ort Böckenberg and at the Hamburg Frise Art Air Gallery under the curatorship of Micheal Kress. In 2019, she received her MFA degree from Yeditepe University Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Plastic Arts. She lives and works in Istanbul.
In her series “Let’s Have a Little Conversation”, the armchairs placed within undefined spaces act as surreal images, allowing the viewer to build both individual and collective memory. The birds, on the other hand, establish a connection with the armchairs that are visually clear but spatially vague witnesses in an ever growing solitude, as if questioning their witness position, trying to remember and to speak to a memory that becomes all the more solitary…
In her works on the concept of time, the artist takes the old family photographs as a reference to reveal and reinterpret the long lost points within these documented, frozen images from everyday life. In her paintings addressing areas like medicine or military school where the witness position is particularly challenging, the figures gaze at the viewer with the awareness that the viewer gazes at them as well, and this mutual gaze unifies these two moments.