What You Seek Is Seeking You

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, January 9, 6-8pm at Open Studio

ARTIST TALK: Saturday, February 21, 1-3pm at Open Studio
Free to attend, please RSVP here.

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What You Seek Is Seeking You by Alize Zorlutuna is an exhibition that brings together imagery drawn from Islamic miniature painting and Ebru, the Anatolian art of paper marbling, to generate new configurations of land and air. Motifs of earth, wind, and cloud are lifted from their original positions in the backgrounds of historic miniature paintings—often scenes of battle, conquest, and grand myth—and reassembled into imagined landscapes. Rock formations that once served as witnesses to larger narratives become active agents for building new worlds.

Translated through screenprinting, a process that both preserves and unsettles their established forms, these elements are reoriented and reconfigured. Printed landforms hover in indeterminate space and time, their surfaces facing upward and downward simultaneously. Defying gravity and a single horizon, they position the viewer at shifting angles and orientations.

In reorienting these elements for the present—outside the narratives of conflict and power through which they are often encountered—the works gesture toward the possibility of worlds beyond such grand mythologies. This oblique positioning resonates with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, in which queerness is understood as a deviation from normative orientations: a “becoming oblique” in relation to the world. Here, land itself is queered—angled, suspended, and loosened from inherited ways of seeing and inhabiting space.

What You Seek Is Seeking You invites viewers to consider how land and wind have been represented across traditions, and how these elemental forces are encountered as living, relational presences—seeking us as we seek them.

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Alize Zorlutuna is a queer interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose practice explores relationships to land, culture, and the more-than-human through diasporic ways of knowing. Moving between Tkarón:to and Anatolia throughout their life has shaped an attentiveness to spaces of encounter—where bodies, geographies, and elemental forces meet in processes of negotiation and co-becoming. Working across video, installation, printed matter, performance, and sculpture, Zorlutuna collages mediums, methods, and geographies to think through place, memory, and belonging. Drawing on material culture from the SWANA region (South West Asia and North Africa), their work traces relationships between land and water, mapping waterways that shape embodied geographies of home. 

Zorlutuna has presented work at institutions including the National Museum of Norway (Oslo), Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Art Gallery of Burlington, Images Festival, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Plug In ICA, InterAccess, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Next Contemporary, Gallery TPW, Varley Art Gallery, XPACE, the Audain Art Museum, Stride Gallery, Access Gallery, The New School: Parsons, Mind Art Core, and Club Cultural Matienzo.

Alize Zorlutuna gratefully acknowledges funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and The Japanese Paper Place.