Ece Batur's practice examines how the body absorbs, carries, and quietly alters the structures that shape it. Working across performance, moving image, textile, and installation, she treats repetition as both method and material, using gesture to trace how memory and discipline settle into the body over time.
Drawing on her Turkish upbringing and on feminist and postcolonial thought, Batur approaches domestic labour and care as knowledge passed between generations, often without ever being named or taught. Cleaning, washing, folding, mending, carrying, tending: these ordinary actions are where gendered knowledge is transmitted. Within this vocabulary, care and control are not necessarily opposites. The same gestures that protect and nurture can also constrain and demand. Her work stays within this ambiguity without seeking to resolve it.
In Batur's practice, the body functions as an archive, holding what was never consciously chosen. Through duration and physical exposure, the performing body becomes a site of tension where what has been handed down meets the conditions of the present. Materials work in a similar way. The textiles and domestic materials she works with carry the residues of contact, labour, and time, so that memory exists not only as something recalled but as something physically held.
This inheritance is never stable. As gestures move across generations, geographies, and contexts, they are translated and displaced rather than simply kept or abandoned. Batur is less concerned with cultural identity as something fixed than with the space that opens between what is carried and what is encountered.
Repetition is where that space becomes visible. A gesture performed again and again may intensify, drift, or fall out of alignment. Care may harden into discipline; softness may carry weight; persistence may become difficult to distinguish from constraint. Her work asks whether change can emerge from within the gestures we continue to carry.