ARTISTIC STATEMENT

My work lives in the coexistence of strength and fragility. The purity, reductionism and severity that formed my perception and artistic path during my educational years in Germany, I paired, over time and by necessity, with my own vulnerability, and with the doubt, skepticism and melancholy that came with that formation.

Led by curiosity and passion, I believe art is not an object but a medium of exchange: for knowledge, for the creation of new perspectives. It reaches where language cannot. I make art to be felt, to enter the beholder without demanding to be understood, to remain long after the encounter, as memory, as emotion, as something that stays.

For me, art is a connection between strangers: the only antidote to alienation, another pathway to love, a medium for interaction in its most authentic form, without words, without preset knowledge.

Rahşan Düren is a German-Turkish artist living and working in Istanbul. Trained in Medicine, Art History, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Neuroscience across Germany, Turkey, Italy and the United States, she holds a formation that rarely finds a single name: active clinician, humanitarian practitioner, researcher in neuroaesthetics, and founder of an association dedicated to bringing art to rural communities.

Her artistic practice began in 1993 at the Kunstverein Aachen. She has held nine solo exhibitions across Germany, Venice and Istanbul. Self-initiated, self-funded, free to the public. Her work extends across painting, installation, sculpture, and film, and has long engaged sound, dance and video as synaesthetic dimensions, in collaboration with pianist Aydın Esen, drummer Ranjit Barot, and filmmaker-composer Metecan Düren.