A talk with Ceylan Öztrük

Welcome to Black Box teater, Ceylan! Can you introduce yourself to those of us who don't know you from before? Hi, I am an artist based in Zürich. I will be showing my last piece Wearing the Angles, Kissing the Room at Black Box teater.

How would you describe the creative process behind your work? I don’t have a specific methodology or preferred process to follow. One of many I can say I work with is Auto-theories. I work with texts & notes that are taken anytime that build a base of my performances and my artistic practice in general. In a given context and taking into account the specificities, I materialize my written fragments – as performances, sculptures, or in the form of prose. It is a subjective result of the theory I read or the discourse I am immersed in and my own perspective, mixing up with personal anecdotes, giving them a form.

Where did you get inspiration from when working with Wearing the Angles, Kissing the Room? I have been building my performances in the concept of orientation, and I wanted to narrate on disorientation in the last work. The work foregrounds the concept of orientation to reconsider spatiality, by hosting disorientation. It is a narrative on the clash between the body and the building, the person and the institution, the soft and the not so soft. This also could be the third episode of my performance works on orient and orientation.

Can you tell us a bit about how you explore the relationship between the various expressions you work with? It is to weave all the elements, expressions into the work with a direction of artistic background, or intuition. Hard to explain; though it is attractive to see all parts you insisted on coming together and becoming a body. It is as if you walk towards an end-image you have dreamt of, not knowing where and how. Of course, this only happens by trying things, loving and hating parts and negotiating for the sake of the work. Learning what to hold on and what to let go.

Wearing the Angles, Kissing the Room will be shown November 15–16.