Primarily working across sculpture, watercolor, photography, and textile, Arda Asena explores the thresholds of identity through interior landscapes, approaching them as both lived experience and symbolic construction. Their practice examines how physical and psychological tensions are harbored in the self, translating these states into forms that slip between the visible and the concealed. Film, memory, and abstraction serve as recurring points of departure, anchoring works that attend to grief, metamorphosis, and survival.

Through a visual language that echoes queer modes of resilience, Asena traces the mourning of past selves and the cracks left by societal violence. These interstitial spaces become sites of expression as much as withholding. In this, their work resonates with the logic of Turkish carpet weaving, where meaning is embedded in symbols, legible only to those attuned to decipher them.

Neither strictly figurative nor purely abstract, Asena’s practice resists the impulse to render the interior fully visible. Instead, it insists on opacity—on what remains unspoken yet still present. Across layered gesture, material, and form, they stage identity as both collective and personal, fragile and enduring: a field where grief and metamorphosis entwine.