Asya Leman
01/11/2022 - 31/12/2021
Asya
Leman is an activist and visual artist based in Istanbul. She
received her bachelor’s degree in Photography and Video, and her
master’s degree in Radio, Television and Film from İstanbul Bilgi
University.
She has been producing activist videos and undertaking independent projects in collaboration with non-governmental organizations since 2015.
She was the project manager of the Film Activism Workshop held in Istanbul and Gothenburg between 2017-2018 by SPoD and Swedish Feminist School Kvinnofolkhögskolan.
With her docufiction short film Hükmü Yok produced in 2018, she became interested in constructing visual narratives against the masculine domination of the state through bureaucracy. She focused in her works on the performativity of the bureaucratic ways of classifying the society as well as on confrontations where concepts of identity, gender, and spatiality intersect.
She contributed a video work to "Aşikar Sır”, the exhibition held at Karşı Art Gallery in 2019 by Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi [Truth Justice Memory Center] as part of the International Week of Struggle Against Disappearances in Custody.
In 2020, she became engaged with TAPA (Transformative Art Project for Activists) project organized by independent activists and artists, and exhibited her installation “Aile Cüzdanı” in TAPA exhibition held in Barınhan between December 2020 and January 2021.
Asya usually places herself in the foreground of her imaginative works inspired by her personal experiences. Drawing on documents, images and objects from her personal history, she experiments with creating narratives that offer an inverted version of the lived experience. She produces her works usually with analog tools or techniques of a specific craft.
In the beginning of 2021, she founded a video production studio called Lub 28 where she collaborates with queer artists from different disciplines. In this project, she dreams together with queer artists, and works to make dreams come true.
Country: Turkey