Ece Batur’s practice explores how the self navigates restriction, control, and erasure. Through performance, sound, and installation, she examines the politics of visibility and disappearance. 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 interrogates themes of censorship, displacement, and gendered oppression. Her work reflects on the regulation and erasure of women within dominant power structures, drawing on inherited gestures of care, persistence, and adaptation. The self, for Batur, carries unspoken histories; inscribed in movement, embedded in materials, and passed down through quiet, enduring actions.
She considers censorship as extending beyond language, manifesting in the erasure of the self and the silent disappearance of those who do not conform. Her practice raises urgent questions: Who is allowed to take up space? Who remains unseen? These questions reverberate 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 yet 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 actions, 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; these elements reveal Batur’s commitment to articulating quiet strategies of defiance.
Rather than seeking resolution, her work inhabits states of uncertainty. For Batur, absence is not emptiness but an active 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. By engaging with what remains unseen and unspoken, Ece Batur positions the self as both a vulnerable and defiant site of inquiry.