Arda Asena

Arda Asena’s work traverses photography, sculpture, painting, and textile. His practice is deeply invested in establishing cross-disciplinary connections. Through the translation of similar ideas across mediums, he explores the nuances that emerge through the materiality of each artistic form. His work delves into the abstraction that occurs in these moments of translation, using them as generative opportunities to complicate notions of identity, socio-cultural experiences, and ways of being more broadly. Abstraction serves as a meditative orientation to the interior landscapes of emotions, desires, vulnerabilities, and contradictions inherent in human experience. Central to Asena's practice is the concept of queerness as an aspirational way of being. He moves beyond normative structures, not only in regard to gender and sexuality but also by interrogating capitalist and colonial systems that stifle notions of relationality. Queerness, for Asena, is ever-shifting and generative precisely because it can never be fully known. His work investigates how the material realities of queer people are distorted in attempts to construct queerness as a threat to society under various global governmental regimes. ...