Clairaudience, 2025
Mold-blown glass mounted on the wall
9 x 9 x 11 cm

The performative installation highlights the hand and ear imprints left on a glass pressed against a wall during the familiar childhood act of listening through walls, embodying the discourse of “deep listening.” The impressions of the ear against the glass and the supporting hand were created using a combination of molding techniques and hot glass blowing. During the research phase, my first encounter with molten glass in the hot glass workshop became a key inspiration: the pleasure of being fully present in the moment intertwined with the fear sparked by the sudden heat and the honey-like viscosity of the material.

View from the exhibition “The Staircase is a Circle“, Pg Art Gallery, Istanbul, 2025

A Funeral for My Self, 2023
Performance, photo documentation, transformed plants

First I made a remake performance based on photographic documentations of ectoplasmic séances popular in the early 1900’s, where I used the green glove of my chroma-key costume, “the ectoplasmic output of my self”. Then I filled the same glove with a special mixture of various herbs, water and green food coloring and let it freeze in the freezer. The ice hand molded in this way was removed from the glove and left to melt. The process was documented by photographs, and the remaining solid plant parts were kept for the next stage: the Ash Ritual. In the ritual, I poured some of the dried plants that remained from my “self” into the Golden Horn from the Galata Bridge, while the rest was kept to be served to the audience of my lecture performance where they were to be brewed as tea. As a performative act that explores the possibilities of considering performance and documentation, life and death, before and after, body and mind, individual and society, organism and its environment, self and other in a broader and dynamic framework, this rite of passage is designed to be repeated at certain junctures in life.

We explore the possibilities of being intimate with the legal texts that are far from the daily language, full of abstract concepts, yet affecting our daily life in the most severe way. We do exercises for embodying the language of law using sound, rhythm and movement. Using the rhythm and movement provided by rap music, we reenact the ever-changing Forestry Law by constantly singing, remixing, rewriting it. Guided by our instant sensations, we ask how concepts like “universal”, “public”, “relational” can be embodied. How does language of law relate to what is happening now, between yes and no? Beyond dualities of language, does the sharpening of our senses by recognizing the existence of a spectrum enrich our lives and liberate us? How does the ambiguous structure called “we” maintain its vitality while gaining its formality? Better get a forest air now; let’s open the ears, let’s get into the rhythm:

rightrightrightright / estates galore! / hey you, ho! / march it lawsome / mormon third base / wormsquatting / code in the kickback, yo!

Photo credit: Nazlı Erdemirel

Blue Bird of Happiness, 2020

Performance / Installation consisting of two videos and a photograph

“Blue Bird of Happiness is a series of performances I carried out in various shopping malls in Istanbul that can be accessed from subway stations without leaving the underground. There I sat in the lotus position next to ornamental pools where people give a break from shopping, my entire body covered in a blue suit, including my face. I could stay anonymous while easily being noticed because of the blue chroma key suit, which is normally used in the film industry to make the wearer invisible in front of a background of same color. By remaining silent and motionless among the crowd busy with shopping, eating, and looking around, I aimed to interrupt their flow as well as to draw attention to the presence of other flows. Although my meditation was interfered by security guards from time to time, I observed the nature of my own mind in these shoppers’ resting areas that imitate nature with their lush palm trees and shimmering waterfalls. With the help of my blue suit and my limited vision and breath, I was isolated from these environments designed to maximize consumption. This way, I transformed myself into a human shaped void where ‘shopping’ was removed from the ‘shopping mall’.” Şafak Çatalbaş

Video still

Installation view from the exhibition “Up above was fog, down below was a cloud of dust“, 2020, DEPO, Istanbul
Photo credit: Kayhan Kaygusuz

Morning Run, 2019
Video performance
(video still)

“To live with the same enthusiasm while consuming the resources recklessly, isn’t that a paradox?

Is it life itself, the absurdity in the endless cycle of Sisyphos?

As Zeus is not around, then who is the one that cursed us?

If we start over every time, then how lonely can we be?

Didn’t we come this far all together – plant, fungi, animal, bacteria?

Is this life our own choice?

When would it change then?

Once our perceptions transcend our bodies and movements? Maybe.

The imagination of a new life has always been immense and blue.

Somewhat like Rumi says, ‘if your cup can’t take much water, why is the sea to blame?’

To enlarge our cup, the only way is to keep on running, seemingly:

within the green space of two square-meters falling to our share,

every morning, dead or alive,

with small steps at times, and big ones at others.”

Şafak Çatalbaş

Şafak Çatalbaş, Morning Run, 2019
Video performance / Single channel video with color and sound, 6’53’’, loop
(excerpt from the video)
Drone shooting: Abdullah Kırbaş

With a blue chroma-key suit covering my body, I went out for a morning run. My running field was limited to two square-meters, the average urban green space for each person living in Istanbul. Flying like birds of prey above my head, a drone was video-recording my run. Later, I added a chroma-key effect to the documentation video so that clouds pass by through the void of my body. A constant buzzing sound accompanies the footage.

“Intergalactic” exhibition, 2019, Anna Laudel Gallery, Istanbul. Photo by Kayhan Kaygusuz

Şafak Çatalbaş participates in the exhibition with a work titled, “Instant Enlightenments” through which she deals with yoga and meditation practices. On one side, the artist creates short circuits where she brings together yoga instructions with advertisements’ language. She points to the seemingly motionless actions and state of inertia and contemplates on their possibilites for survival. The artist plays with the idea that giving reactionary responses to the continues flow of feeds of contemporary media, people get into some kind of insecurity and sense of panic. As a possibility to restore the sense of security, she suggests slowing down and ‘floating.’

Post Truth Spa Center – seance02

Performance (realized by Şafak Çatalbaş in 2019, within the event program of “In the Blink of A Bird” exhibition by Sis Collective at nGbK, Berlin)

In this performance Şafak Çatalbaş takes the role of a “Portal Opener”. She invites the participants for a seance, a rite of passage, and guides them using mindfulness practices inspired by the “new age” gestures of post-truth era. Participants go through the “Portal” constructed as the final stage of “Bureaucratic Application Anxiety Therapy Agency”, consisting of a series of stations where pseudo-consultation sessions with different themes are performed.

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In this performance, I invited gallery visitors to focus on my Facebook profile, projected onto a tub filled with water and start running a hypnosis session. Starting like a usual hypnotherapy session, guided by my meditative voice, the session gradually turned into a process of automatic talking where my stream of consciousness was synchronised with the Facebook news feed. Photos: Oliver Möst

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Appearing all of a sudden in the midst of the Istanbul’s open guts and settling in the gallery’s staircase, Tapeworm is a goddess with a woman’s bust and a giant tapeworm from the waist down. Flipping her long hair made of magnetic tapes, she goes around talking incessantly and working like a myth-generating machine. Tapeworm, the underground oracle within us, is a mobile haruspex telling fortune from the city’s bowel. This performance was realized by Şafak Çatalbaş on İstiklal Avenue, a busy historical street located in İstanbul’s city centre. The work was performed in 2017, when the street was in a never-ending construction process.

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Post-Truth Spa Center provides a fictitious relaxing space set up for revising our relationship with daily news, in a time when our perception of reality is turned on its head. In our contemporary condition where news tend to address the sensations rather than the reality, this space takes the motto ‘Let it happen as you feel’, it hints at how collective irrationality lays the foundations of our world, and makes us face the fact that the more we willingly fall for this nonsense, the more we become a part of it.

View from the “Post-Truth Spa Center” – after the performance

Post-Truth Spa Center was located as an independent area, on the second floor of the “In The Blink Of A Bird” exhibition. The space worked as a performative installation area hosting various works that communicate each other and the post-truth concept. A performance was held by Şafak Çatalbaş here.

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The performance was called “Sensational News Session With Omni-antenna”. The artist instantly created fictional news and broke them to the audience in the room, as the Twitter newsfeed was projected onto the space wall, as everyone could see live. Imitating the language of a news anchor, she synchronised Twitter news streams with her stream of consciousness. While having a head massage from someone among the audience, she followed her mind-rhythm and filled this formal language with absurd content triggered by momentary/spontaneous feelings she experienced.

Dream Shower, 2017
Sound installation consisting of four shower heads with speakers installed inside, shower spirals, cables, mp3 players

Passages I’ve read from my dream diaries flow to the ears of the visitors of “Post-Truth Spa Center” through the shower heads. Four “dream-shower-heads” are present in the spa center, offering “dream shower” to the visitors for single, double, three or four at the same time.

View from the exhibition “In The Blink Of A Bird” at DEPO – “Post-Truth Spa Center” / Click for the trailer

Dream Shower, 2017 / Post-Truth Spa Center / View from the exhibition “In The Blink Of A Bird” / DEPO, Istanbul

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“Dream of the Blind Melon”, performance, 20-23 April 2017, Salt Galata

“Dream of the Blind Melon” is a four-day performance realised in the framework of the performative exhibition “Blow Up: Kavunu Gördüm” (Blow Up: I Saw The Melon) -in collaboration with Elif Süsler, Aslı Narin, Didem Erk- between 20-23 April 2017 at SALT Galata, Istanbul.

From the performance / Day 2

“I walk around the city with a melon and record the words I can make out from the mass of endless conversations, which my fellow traveller melon, known as one of the oldest domestic seeds, has been collecting and storing all along like an ancient memory. I bring the dialogs, voices and whispers from the street to the exhibition space and keep typing them on a typewriter. Sitting and meditating in the middle of a melon circle during my sessions throughout the day, I re-perform these ‘quotations from street’ as an improvised monolog for the duration of the whole exhibition, i.e. for four days. Meanwhile, a series of photographs of my performance in the city is continuously shown in the space via slide projector.” Şafak Çatalbaş

“Dream of the Blind Melon”, performance video documentation , 2017

PUURRAPP, performance, “To Seminar”, BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 2017

PUURRAPP – Purifying Unifying Urban Rappers’ Raw Appeal – is an experimental performative artistic research project (in the framework of the collective project “Co-action Device: I Rather Laugh”) which involves researching the potentials of narrative within the body and the language in order to create a zone beyond representation. We conducted a workshop focusing on the gap between the abstracted language of legal texts and the concreteness of everyday life. Our workspace was a stage decorated as a court hall. An attempt to work intimately with complicated law texts is the core of the method. Working within the axis of bodily/facial expressions and texts, sensations were triggered by personal memories in relation to real court cases, which resulted in rap songs produced in collaboration with students of MaHKU. Using our capacity to be present in the moment was the key of the whole process and rap music paved the way for us, thanks to the feeling of the rhythm it provides. We got involved with complicated law texts through our sensations to meet the language of the street again. At the end of the workshop, texts selected from the constitutions of nine countries were performed as a multi-lingual rap song, with the mottos “rap the constitution” or “paw that law”.

take the stage / make your rules / you are the law / find your voice / law as a body / paw that law! / get out of your body / move in a bow / shake your tongue with fresh made law / law as a body / paw that law! / instant law / constant paw / law as a body / paw that law! / law as a body / paw that law!

Wu Yingyi, Marlene Redtenbacher, Dinos Milonas – PUURRAPP workshop participants / MaHKU students

“Attention Please”, lyrics by Dinos Milonas – PUURRAPP workshop participant / MaHKU student

From the working process

Kino-Palavra, performative installation, 2016.
View from the performative installation, “Three Legged Table: An Organism“, REM Art Space, Çukurcuma, İstanbul, 11-19 March 2016.

Being present at the exhibition space, I wrote instant scenarios combining up-to-date entries of my dream diary with real people’s dialogues from the street and invited visitors to auditions for a durational casting process. As audition process was continuing with everyday changing scenarios, a daily growing archive of casting footages was projected on the wall.

Memorandum book, typewriter, instant scenerios, “Dream Radio”

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Kino-Palavra / Auditions / Day 2

Official Dream Diary, 2014
Custom notebook

I made a notebook combining my dream diary with several issues of the Official Gazette of the Republic of Turkey, both from the same period of time, i.e. 2014-2010. I brought these two daily sources together via crosscutting, relating them in a flow full of gaps, resembling the language of dreams. I picked up keywords from a diary entry written in a specific time frame and searched them on the Official Gazette website. Many results came out, whose number I reduced by adding new keywords and searching until there was only a single result left. I used the date of this result to select a dream with the closest matching date from the original diary. Then I repeated the same process ten times in a row, by using keywords from the last selected dream each time, and eventually matching 10 dreams with 10 issues of the official gazette published within the last 4 years.

Could it be possible to create a new public space using a diary practice in order to activate both the public and the private and let them reveal their obscure aspects? Could it be possible that keeping a diary — recording events in certain periods and sharing them — can update its own credibility as a practice which is strange and familiar at once, in a world full of reason and unreason?

Text on the wall is a narrative consisted of quotations from two novels; Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
For full text on the wall click here

1- “Schlachthof-fünf”, video, 18″
2- “Citizen Cosmos Om Competition“, performance documentation video, 3’39″

In this work I used the same staging methods as L’espace – quoting as a performative act – and both works which are based on a performative process can be considered as site specific. The place where this wall is located was once an old slaughterhouse in Dresden, now an art space / exhibition area called Ostrale. I produced this work during my stay at the Ostrale residency and at the end of one month stay, exhibited there. Ostrale exhibition area consisted of several rooms and the room I showed my work was “number 5”, which has a strong connection to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse – Five. (Dresden was bombed in the World War 2, Vonnegut’s character Billy, who was “unstuck in time”, escaped the bombing there, in that slaughterhouse.) Besides that, during my residency I was staying in a very small wooden house, living a daily life which has something in common to Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: regularly meditating, practicing yoga, taking notes of day and night, writing dream diaries, tasting the nature outside and my own nature inside. I also made a series of performances in the city with people waiting in front of the train stations: “Citizen Cosmos Om Competition”. Within all this process I started to play with narrative connections of notions like past/present/future and fiction/documentation in order to find a zone in-between, beyond representation.

All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

Detail from the installation “Cosmic Echolalia”, Ostrale’014, Dresden, 2014

View from the installation “Cosmic Echolalia”, Ostrale’014, Dresden, 2014

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