Betül Aksu          LANDING CARD

Betül Aksu, Landing Card, 2023-2025

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

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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.

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A landing card is completed at the edge of a country, and Cornwall, a peninsula whose history is bound up with departure as much as arrival, is never far from that edge. LANDING CARD asks a great deal of the audience, inviting them to stand, briefly, inside the position of the other, moving through a system that stresses and judders, and resolves everything into stark binaries: admitted or refused, visible or erased. Transmission is at the core of what artists do, ideas move freely across borders; bodies do not. This exhibition arrives at a moment when migration is argued over in the language of numbers, thresholds and control, and the people at its centre are most often rendered as statistics or threats. Betül’s response is neither polemic nor spectacle.

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The works join a lineage of practice that treats documentation itself as material and evidence of the institution as a system to be exposed. Writing on Hans Haacke, Leo Steinberg described art objects whose "aesthetic presence was as nothing compared to their unforgettable impact as facts", a description that could equally apply to Betül's altered forms. But where Haacke's exposure of Manhattan real-estate holdings worked at an impersonal and institutional scale, Betül's work is deeply personal and temporal: closer to Tehching Hsieh's (an undocumented immigrant to the United States) year-long performances, they place us in the arrivals hall, an anticipatory, cold and nervous place.

 

This sense of duration is echoed in Betül’s current three year performance ‘Global Talent Immigration Performance’, an ongoing work that stages Betül’s own immigration status as a durational, administrative condition. Both stage and material, it exposes the conditions, rules, and absurdities of living, working, and being recognized as a “Global Talent” within a system that decides who qualifies and what counts as artistic value. These artworks act as records of the liminal spaces that exist between borders and status’. 

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LANDING CARD is the first exhibition at Rough Hewn, and it was chosen as a statement of intent. Our programme will evolve as we evolve, and will always be artist led. We will show work we believe in. We will endeavour to convey, to as broad an audience as possible, why we feel the work we present, and the artists we champion, are significant and worthy of your attention.

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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.

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To take part in ‘Global Talent Immigration Performance’ go to: betulaksu.com/global-talent-immigration-performance 

 

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About the artist