Deniz Yılmazlar | Karbon was born in 1979. In 2008 she graduated from Yıldız Technical University Faculty of Art and Design, Department of Photography and Video (B.F.A.) followed by Istanbul Bilgi University Department of Visual Communication Design (M.F.A.) in 2012. She lives and works in Istanbul. The artist explores the aesthetics and problematics of subjects such as reality and its twisted versions, the flexibility of rules, predeterminations, family, individualism, memory, remembering and forgetting.

“I take pictures, so that I can remember. I’m curious about how we forget and how this process can become visible. I want to know how we forget a face that once was familiar, the emotions a place evokes, a scent, i.e. a memory or memories, which pieces get deleted first and how. Through photographs, I hope to bring suppressed memories and traumas back to the surface and to experience its possible consequences. I discuss whether one can render visible those new images and ideas that emerge in relation to memories as a result of efforts in hiding, changing, ignoring or creating, sometimes exaggerating or fudging the presently influential details of my own history, or in turning the unbearable into the bearable. By combining the stories in the old and found photographs with those issues that leave a mark on the present I intend to see whether it is possible to reinterpret my own individual history, and to question the limits of the experience of creating a new past. And I care about sharing the potential results of these curiosities and explorations with others”.