Artist Statement

In her figurative oil paintings, Helin Serindağ builds scenes fed by emotion, memory, imagination, ruptures, experiences and wounds. At times a subjective experience or the traces of a traumatic process, at times a political issue, sits at the centre of her work.

Helin’s solo series, Anatomy in a Different Way, created between 2022 and 2024, was showcased in Çanakkale and Istanbul. The series depicts the inner structures of people from different ethnicities and gender identities, stands against discrimination, racism, and homophobia, and celebrates the beauty of diversity.

In 2024, Helin was accepted as a guest artist into Saye Collective Art Residency Program. The residency began with the uncensored version of her previously censored and canceled TEDx talk, and continued with visitors sharing their personal experiences with censorship. Drawing inspiration from these testimonies, Helin created paintings, conducted workshops, and opened the space to collaborative creation. The stories born from the shadows of collective memory were written on cards, painted onto canvases, and transformed, as censorship became fertilizer for art, and the fruits of this process culminated in a collective exhibition titled ‘Censor Free Zone’, marking the conclusion of the residency.

Her most recent series, Reconstruction, brings this artistic approach into an intensely personal yet conceptually layered terrain. The series focuses on the process through which a neurologist-artist, diagnosed with a brain tumor located in the speech center, becomes reduced to a medical case, an object, and, through artistic creation, gradually reclaims her position as a subject. When language fell silent, art became a tool of repair. By filtering trauma through an aesthetic discipline, the passive experience of being a patient transforms into an active act of creation.

Helin Serindağ’s art continues to create a profound and transformative space of expression, emerging from both personal and societal wounds.