Betül Aksu          LANDING CARD

Betül Aksu, Landing Card, 2023-2025

​

Rough Hewn is pleased to announce LANDING CARD, an exhibition by Betül Aksu
(b.1990, Izmir, Turkey. Lives and works in London and Izmir) 

​

This Exhibition will present all five works in the LANDING CARD series, produced between 2023-2025. In each of the works comprising LANDING CARD, Betül Aksu alters official UK border force forms by filling them with grids of black ink, completely obscuring the personal details typically required. Only the dots from Turkish characters like İ and ü remain visible, serving as subtle traces of identity within a system designed to categorize and control. These small marks act as quiet testaments to presence, language and memory. Framed through a personal lens, the work documents the current realities of migration, transforming instruments of surveillance into sites of resistance and reflection.

 

In Betül's work Borders are approached as lived conditions that organise bodies, temporalities, and relations, extending beyond their function as geopolitical lines. A recurring concern in Betül's work is how systems of governance produce presence and absence, shaping visibility, access and participation in uneven ways. Betül  engages with official language and bureaucratic documents as material, reading, interrupting and reworking them to reveal their underlying logic. Through this, Betül understands freedom as something continuously negotiated, deferred, or withheld rather than a fixed state. Rough Hewn welcomes the dialogues that this work provokes, both between this work and the history of socially concerned and political art work, our current polarised political climate, and the wider social context that we exist in.

​

About the artist