Ece Batur’s practice explores how the self navigates restriction, erasure, and control through repetition. Through performance, sound, and installation, she approaches gestures as sites where memory, discipline, and resistance quietly accumulate. In her work, objects, spaces, and gestures absorb, carry, and resist the forces imposed upon them. Small movements, traces of presence, and acts of limitation are charged with radical significance.
Rooted in her Turkish cultural background, Batur engages with domestic materials and gestures as carriers of intergenerational memory. Her work reflects on the regulation and erasure of women within dominant power structures, drawing on inherited gestures of care, persistence, and change. The self, for Batur, carries unspoken histories; inscribed in movement, embedded in materials, and transmitted through quiet, enduring actions. Within her practice, the domestic sphere operates as both a site of discipline and a space for subtle forms of resistance.
Her practice brings up urgent questions: Who is allowed to take up space? Who remains unseen? These questions ring through her use of movement, objects, and absence. The body, in Batur’s work, bends within power systems; adapting, resisting, disappearing, and returning. Through constraint and repetition, she exposes the underlying structures of control that are often unnoticed, still deeply embedded in social and psychological frameworks. Materials hold memory, sound disrupts and resonates, and gestures become inscriptions of historical endurance.
Rituals of care, survival, and adaptation reside in the smallest movements, often overlooked or dismissed. The way hands repeat familiar motions, the way stillness quietly refuses to yield, and the way softness becomes a form of resistance reveal Batur’s devotion to articulating quiet strategies of resistance.
Her work inhabits states of uncertainty. For Batur, absence is not emptiness, but a potent force. It interrogates systemic erasure, challenges expectations of visibility, and unsettles structures of legibility and control. Restraint creates tension, forming spaces that resist immediate recognition or definition. Through engaging with what remains unseen and unsaid, Ece Batur positions the self as both a vulnerable and defiant site of inquiry.