What You Seek Is Seeking You

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

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 work explores relationships to land, culture and the more-than-human, while thinking through, history, ancestral wisdom and healing. Having moved between Tkarón:to and Anatolia (present-day Turkey) both physically and culturally throughout their life has informed Alize’s practice—making them attentive to spaces of encounter. Alize enlists poetics and a sensitivity to materials in works that span video, installation, printed matter, performance and sculpture. The body and its sensorial capacities are central to their work.

Alize has presented work in galleries and artist-run centres across Turtle Island, including: Plug In ICA, InterAccess, Gallery TPW, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Mercer Union Centre For Contemporary Art, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Art Gallery of Burlington, XPACE, Audain Art Museum, Access Gallery, as well as internationally at The New School: Parsons (NY), Mind Art core (Chicago) and Club Cultural Matienzo (Argentina). Alize has been a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University since 2015.

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