Abstractions that make time tangible

Selin Çiftci
4 saat önce
5 dakikada okunur

Zeynep Beler’s solo exhibition titled Intraface, held at Martch Art Project from October 31 to December 21, 2025, visualizes the fragmented, fleeting moments of the digital world, revealing the the limits of impatience, waiting, and our attention. We spoke with the artist about her practice and her relationship with these threshold images

Interview: Selin Çiftci

Zeynep Beler

When I first saw the works in Intraface, the first feeling I had was impatience. I am in a moment of waiting, waiting for the image in front of me to become clear/reveal itself; but that moment never comes. Was it your intention to create an experience that would make the viewer aware of their own digital habits or perception of speed? How did the idea of concretizing these “in-between moments” take shape?

I did not anticipated that this feeling would be reflected so directly; hearing this makes me happy. Because when I first began working with these images, my first thought was a certain plastic effect and the layered nature of the pixel noise that would be transferred to the material when enlarged. However, the starting point of the images actually comes from my experience of such impatience. For the past seven years, long ferry trips have been part of my life, and I became so familiar with the unloaded images while trying to look at the flow in the middle of the sea and the command that loaded them as a blurry “middle ground” threshold image that I started collecting them. This software was actually intended to turn one or two seconds of waiting time into a “seamless” transition, but for me, it remained stuck at that threshold. Eventually I gave up on waiting and began to examine those images themselves.

I remember at first enlarging them on the screen and examining the color transitions, wondering what color this was exactly, how I could achieve this effect if I painted it. The textures of low-resolution images, the ways they materialize, have always fascinated me. After the first images appeared, I began to think about their possible conceptual meanings; the underlying reasons why I was drawn to these images, the economy of attention and the anonymization of images in the flow. These images are a kind of visualization of an unwanted hiccup, saying, “Don't worry, your uninterrupted browsing experience hasn't been interrupted, it continues beyond this threshold,” but when it doesn't, we regain the interest we entrusted to the flow, as if waking up from a dream.

Left: Zeynep Beler, Intraface I, 100x70 cm, Oil pastel on paper, 2025

Right: Zeynep Beler, Intraface II, 100x70 cm, Oil pastel on paper, 2025

How does the process of collecting the the visual materials you use in the exhibition? What criteria or methods guide you when selecting the frames you compile?

It’s intuitive. I'd say the first year was like a trial period. Some frames were simply more effective than others in terms of their ability to provoke curiosity, that feeling of impatience caused by opacity. Frankly, the fact that it was more challenging and enjoyable to do was also a factor. Over time, choosing these frames became easier for me.

Collecting the images is a completely random process.Some come from social media feeds, some from messaging apps, others from news sites or forums, sources I naturally encounter in daily life. The process also includes censorship and spoiler filters, declining searches...

Left to right: Zeynep Beler, Plasm, 240x150 cm, Oil pastel on paper, 2025

Zeynep Beler, Bufferbloat, 240x150, Oil pastel on paper, 2025

Zeynep Beler, Penumbra, 235x150 cm, Oil pastel on paper, 2025

Is translating the fleeting, temporary “moments” of digital media, limited by screen time or Internet speed, onto canvas and making them permanent through a traditional medium a kind of deconstruction? How do you interpret the tension between transience and permanence here?

That’s actually a reading I’ve always hoped for. I’ve long been drawn to images that are somehow considered worthless, unremarkable, or disposable. I’m not sure if I’d call it deconstruction, but I think of it as a kind of counter-abstraction. I like to imagine that by transferring this fleeting visual experience, this state of being stuck in a threshold, onto paper, I’m materializing it, making it visible, or perhaps rendering a previously opaque process transparent.

Because really, what happens if I don’t see a representation of these images for that one second? That platform loses my attention, and its main currency is precisely that, my attention. By pulling me toward that threshold through these visuals, it’s actually guiding me, steering me. In the face of the developers’ agency, I become passive. So perhaps making these paintings is, in a way, an attempt to reclaim my agency within a culture of seeing.

Zeynep Beler, res bina, 230x150 cm, Oil pastel on paper, 2024

Your early drawings feature more figurative elements. At the point you've reached in your practice today, we can see abstractions that concretize time. How do you position this change in your practice; is it a dissolution stemming from the nature of the digital, or a continuation of a rupture?

I like the term “concretizing time” because I think the bridge between my old figurative works and my new works is indeed related to temporality and materiality. As I mentioned, I was always drawn to images that tend to be overlooked. What interested me was the contrast between poor or purely functional digital images, the kind one might delete from their phone memory, immediately forget, saying, “This photo didn't turn out right, or I took it just to show someone something”, and the weight of painting, the act of fixing the ephemeral and extending the relationship with it over time.

Similarly, I was collecting and painting low-resolution images from the internet that artist Joan Fontcuberta called “orphan” images, images without a source that had been copied many times. I had a feeling that the time I spent transferring the image to paper or canvas, the time I spent with it, and the time the viewer spent with the image would be directly proportional. Therefore, we can say that what I am doing now is a natural extension of that.

Left to right: Zeynep Beler, Delta, 150x100 cm, Oil pastel on paper, 2025

Zeynep Beler, Untitled, 150x100 cm, Oil pastel on paper, 2025

I know that you’ve also worked with photography and explored montage practices in your earlier production. How does the increasing role of Artificial Intelligence in visual production processes affect your approach to digital and online visual culture?

I’ve come to find images created by human hands, those that contain human (and/or analog) errors more valuable. AI initially sparked my curiosity too, but it's a problematic tool, especially when used to bypass traditional production methods and producers. For starters, there's the ethical issue of using the work of millions of artists anonymously to train this tool. On the other hand, images created by averaging such a large pool tend to be bland, unremarkable, and instantly recognizable as kitsch.

In fact, earlier versions of these tools had more errors and imperfections, which gave them a strange and compelling aesthetic. But as the technology became more refined, those imperfections disappeared, and that’s when I completely lost interest, even as a tool for play or sketching. Those earlier flaws and surreal, unusable frames, the self-censorship, and the awkward coexistence of its training sources, those “stitches”, were visible, and that visibility was fascinating because it pointed back to its sources. They removed these seams.

For me, this process also clarified something: creating images that serve as indicators is something I care about. Therefore, I feel like my practice will always be connected to lens-based media in some way.