Tracing What the Sea Alters

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, September 11, 6-8pm at Open Studio

Tracing What the Sea Alters begins with the sea as both a material presence and a site of ongoing transformation. Özge Dîlan Arslan’s installation engages with the stratified historical, geopolitical, and material conditions of the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, invoking entangled narratives of migration, forced displacement, maritime exchange, shipwreck, and the sedimentation of submerged artifacts. Through patchworked linen, photographic gel transfers, screenprinted symbolic forms, and sewn elements, Arslan allows different histories and temporalities to surface alongside one another.

The work relies heavily on the water-based gel-transfer process. This material approach has allowed Arslan to embed photographic impressions of the seas into fabric. The resulting images fragment, dissolve, and become abstracted, and as the textile descends, the imagery of the seas deepens in tone and opacity, shifting between luminosity and darkness as it gradually recedes from the familiar horizon and toward density.

The project is extended through a publication that operates as a parallel site of inquiry, bringing together essayistic writing, research, and visual fragments to continue exploring how the seas reshape both matter and narrative. What persists is not a fixed image, but a shifting trace that carries the memory of its own transformation. At its core, the work asks how the sea alters what it touches.

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Özge Dîlan Arslan (b. 1994, İstanbul) is an artist based in Tkarón/Toronto. Her practice spans printmaking, image-making, writing, archival research, publishing, and curatorial work. Working through material processes, Arslan explores how memory, movement, and histories of displacement register over time, particularly through surfaces shaped by environmental and historical forces. Water, textile, and print recur in her work as forms that hold traces of passage, transformation, and loss.

Arslan is the founder of ASTAR Editions, an artist-run publishing collective. Her recent projects include collaborations with The Asian Canadian Living Archive (TACLA), including the publication Bodies of Knowledge, as well as research and archival work with the Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought and SKETCH Working Arts. From 2017 to 2021, she founded and directed Diaspora Express, a Southwest Asian and North African art collective focused on community-led exhibitions and cultural programming. Her curatorial projects include Threads of Resistance (2022) and Changing the Current (2020).

Arslan holds a joint Master of Arts in Communication and Culture from Toronto Metropolitan University and York University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Media Studies from Carleton University. She is currently a candidate in the Master of Visual Studies (Studio) program at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.