Dans l’atelier de Alize Zorlutuna

When I visit Alize Zorlutuna in their home studio, located on a tree-lined street near High Park in Toronto’s west end, it is one of the coldest days of the year so far. I am welcomed into a warm, light-filled room on the second floor with the offer of freshly made tea and a seat on a low comfortable couch, surrounded by tufted carpets. Much like their multimodal practice, Zorlutuna’s studio is full of places for contemplation, hospitality, and rest, nestled among research materials and treasured objects, shelves containing books and pottery, and corkboards displaying screenprints and found photographs. These textured -layers provide the containing environment for the sites of production that underpin Zorlutuna’s current practice: a loom supports a large carpet work in progress, and on a desk nearby wait a stack of silver trays for creating Ebru, the elaborate marbled patterns typically found in the end papers of antique books. These materials are evidence of the ongoing, recursive work that Zorlutuna undertakes as they teach themselves forgotten, time-honoured techniques from their ancestral homelands in Anatolia (present-day Türkiye), adapting these methods to engage audiences in timely, and funny, reflections on the need for collective acts of grief, communal organizing, and stretching as an act of solidarity.

Gabrielle Moser: Your work is founded, above all else, in material experimentation. Your recent solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB), We Who Have Known Many Shores (2024), included among its list of materials, for instance, ancestral lace work, magazine pages, dried okra, eggplant, and peppers, cotton string, and rose water, but also ceramics, glass and wooden beads, hand-marbled fabric, and video. You are probably best known for your works with Ebru and for learning to tuft your own carpet designs, but more recently you have expanded into messier experiments with pottery, fountains, and large-scale textiles. Has this changed your working methods as an artist to involve more collaborations with institutions?