Cem Altinoz

artistiek onderzoek - audiovisueel - performance

Cem Altınöz (1993, İstanbul, TR) works and plays with images and texts. As a multi-media artist, he investigates the role of imagery and image-making in one’s self-representation, self-reproduction, and self-destruction.

While aiming to reveal and break the limits of spoken and written language through audiovisual media, he explores the place of ‘ownership’ in one’s relationship with the lived body, emphasizing on the significance of the Other in the self-definition of the individual. Deriving from his own experiences with autoimmunity, he strives to make connections between the singular and the universal; often resulting in autobiographical still and moving images that are impure and sullied, roaming in the realms of the uncanny.


a borderless existence - a borderless existence is the result of Altınöz’s fascination with contamination and his personal interest in the concept of autoimmunity. In a borderless existence Altınöz investigates the theories of medical autoimmunity which consider the body’s immune system to be making a distinction between ‘self-cells’ and ‘non self-cells’, defining the latter as dangerous. Being ‘immune to oneself’ translates as a self-destructive act where the self cannot identify itself and consequently destroys its own parts: cells ravage other cells as a result of a misidentification, a symbiotic relationship turns into a blitz on tissues and organs. Altınöz appropriates the model of autoimmunity, the exemplary situation of erasing of borders between the self and its other, into an impure, genre-less moving image. a borderless existence is the dematerialized offspring of Altınöz’s anti-portraiture practice. Emphasizing the relationship of a confused mind and a confused body, an uncanniness on a cellular level, the video displays an autoimmune selfhood’s endeavor to define itself through the images it creates.
transgross - transgross is a personal photobook project consisting of a selection from Altınöz’s personal photographic archive of life and death; an accumulation of his encounters throughout his everyday life in the past years. The collection of images at times evoke an uneasiness, and often plain, core disgust; yet they also captivate the viewer and create a paradoxical situation of a simultaneous attraction and repulsion. The pages of the transgross, made out of recycled materials, contains the residues of the past life of the paper in an obscenely contingent manner. Having the photographic images of the residues of the city life imprinted on them, the tactility is amplified, and organic-ness of the subjects are reproduced in the printed images.
DAWN - A moving image work regarding the phases of the photographic image by following different instances of the creative process, mainly through conception and duplication, revealing the now-archaic process of analog image production. Emphasizing the slowness of the creation, the existence of chemical processes, and the inherent redness of the darkroom. Exhibited in Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, as part of Cloud Cuckoo Land program of the Piet Zwart Institute, at Eye Researchlabs 2020.