Asya Baykara
- Anna Lilli Garai
- May 27
- 6 min read
Asya Baykara’s work sits in a space where thoughts linger and never quite resolve. Her digital portraits feel suspended, like they’ve been pulled from half-formed memories or dreams you can’t explain. She blends image and language with a light touch, letting fragments speak without pushing them too far. There’s a sense of stillness in her process—she collects, edits, and rearranges until something sticks, not because it’s clear, but because it feels right. Raised between Istanbul and Milan, her work carries traces of both places, though it never leans into a single identity. What matters is how things feel when they’re left open.
Q: You start from emotion, not theory. What usually sets a piece in motion?
A: A piece often begins not with an idea, but with a moment I cannot escape—a pause in time that leaves a trace on me emotionally, almost physically. It’s not something I choose; it chooses me. Sometimes it’s a sudden silence between two words, the lingering atmosphere after a conversation, or an image that flashes in my mind and refuses to leave. I start working when I feel this tension between presence and absence—when something within me begins to swell but has no language yet.
My artistic process is rooted in the concept of Kairos—not chronological time, but the opportune, emotionally charged instant. That suspended second where something imperceptible shifts, where a crack opens between what we feel and what we know. That’s where my works take shape. I don’t chase those moments—they surface, and when they do, I try to meet them honestly.
I don’t plan the result. I follow the feeling. The image grows through the act of staying with that feeling—layering, removing, repeating—until it becomes something that speaks back to me. It’s less about building a composition and more about responding to a sensation that refuses to fade.
Q: Why do your figures often feel distant, blurred, or cut off?
A: Because for me, memory is not whole. It erodes, morphs, chooses what to keep and what to let dissolve. The people we remember are rarely complete—they come back to us in fragments: a tilt of the head, a shape of a hand, a glance that never quite lands. I don’t try to reconstruct them. I draw them as they return to me: blurred, cropped, fading.
This is where the question of identity and mirroring comes in. Sometimes I’m not even sure if the figure is someone I once knew, or if it’s a shadow of myself at another time. Faces collapse into each other; familiar outlines blur into the unfamiliar. There is no fixed self, no reliable other—just shifting versions, suspended moments of identification.
What remains is often not the image of the person, but the feeling they once carried within me. And that feeling never matches the face anymore. My figures reflect that emotional residue: not who someone was, but what they once stirred in me. By blurring or cutting off the form, I try to give space to that ambiguity. It’s a visual way of saying: this was real, but not in the way we remember. And perhaps, it never was.
Q: What does repetition mean to you when you’re painting?
A: Repetition, for me, is not about pattern—it’s about being trapped. The faces I draw over and over again are not different people. They are echoes of the same emotional wound, resurfacing in new disguises. During a particularly depressive period, I noticed how each piece I made began to carry the same face, the same gaze, the same stillness. At first it unsettled me. Then I realized: it wasn’t just aesthetic—it was the truth of what I was living.
Repetition became a mirror of my inner loops—emotional cycles I couldn’t escape from.
I kept finding myself in similar stories, making the same mistakes, feeling the same ache. It was as if life had turned into a carousel, and I was watching the horses blur past, unable to tell one from the next. My paintings started to reflect that: figures repeating, expressions melting into each other, faces that could belong to anyone or no one.
Eventually, even the differences between people began to vanish in my perception. When you carry unresolved wounds, you start to see them in everyone you meet. You don’t relate to the person in front of you—you relate to the shadow they cast onto your memory. That’s when the faces in my work began to lose their features. They became translucent, interchangeable, unplaceable. That loss of distinctness wasn’t a stylistic choice—it was an emotional state. So repetition, in my work, is a form of both survival and resistance. It’s the loop, but it’s also the moment of saying enough. It marks the realization that I’ve seen this before, lived this before, and that now I have the power to either break the cycle—or at least to name it.
Q: How do your texts relate to the finished image?
A: My texts are not descriptions. They don’t explain the work—they extend it. I never write before the visual is complete, because I need to feel what the image leaves behind in me before I can put it into language. The writing arrives after everything has quieted, when the tension of the piece begins to settle into a shape I can name—not intellectually, but emotionally.
For me, the image and the text are like two ways of breathing. The visual is the inhale; the moment everything is held, compressed, internalized. The text is the exhale; what is finally released. But even then, it doesn’t clarify. I write in order to let the feeling take a second form.
There’s also an intimacy in writing after drawing. The image often says more than I consciously understand while making it. But once it’s finished, the silence that follows asks something of me—asks me to listen, not to look. That’s when I write.
Not to guide the viewer, but to invite them into that silence, into the uncertainty. I don't want to dictate what they should see. I want to offer a feeling, a shadow, a tremor. Just enough to shift something inside them.
My texts are not conclusions—they are openings. They belong to the same world as the image, but they take a different path through it.
Q: When does a painting feel too open or too closed?
A: A painting feels too open when it tells too much—when it doesn’t leave space for mystery, for projection, for silence. If the image becomes too direct, too eager to explain itself, it begins to lose its pulse. I don’t want to hand the viewer a clear answer. I want them to feel the tension of not knowing, to wander through the image and get a little lost. Openness, for me, is not about clarity—it’s about permeability. And when there’s too much clarity, the work becomes flat. It no longer breathes.
On the other hand, a piece feels too closed when it becomes inaccessible even to me—when I can’t find a way in emotionally, when the layers start to suffocate the core. This usually happens when I’m trying to protect something too much, when the act of creation becomes a form of shielding rather than sharing. Then the work feels sealed off, distant in a way that no longer invites. There’s a fragile space I try to find between the two. I want the viewer to feel that something is being revealed and withheld at the same time. That what they’re looking at is intimate but not entirely reachable—like trying to remember a dream that slips away the moment you try to describe it. That tension between exposure and concealment is where the real emotion lives. It’s what makes an art piece feel alive to me.
Q: Has your approach changed recently, or just what you're focusing on?
A: My entire approach has shifted—but not because I decided to change it. It changed because I changed. I emerged from one of the darkest, heaviest periods of my life, and in that process, the only thing I could hold onto was my portfolio. Everything I created during that time carried a raw, exposed version of me. There were moments I felt unbearably vulnerable—like my insides were on display. That weight was hard to carry. But somehow, the more I gave to the work, the more it gave back. It lightened me.
Looking back now, I realize how much of that early work—especially the pieces in Kairos—carried a kind of silent scream. They speak of blurred identities, looping emotional patterns, the inability to differentiate between faces and wounds. The repetition, the translucency, the slow erasure of features—all of it reflected how I was struggling to not dissolve inside the sameness of pain. Making those pieces was like trying to give form to something formless inside me.
Now, I find myself craving something more physical. My next steps will likely involve more tangible, material-based work. Maybe my visual language will evolve, maybe the style will shift. But those early Kairos works—those will always be sacred to me. They are like the scent of something forgotten but deeply familiar. Nostalgic, yes. But also heavy. Like the weight of a version of myself I had to leave behind.
In a strange way, I dealt with the heaviness of my life by taking on an even bigger burden—by turning my inner chaos into a responsibility to create. And now, as I step into new terrain, I carry that weight more gently. Not as a wound, but as a history. My art was once the mirror I couldn’t look away from. Now it’s becoming something I can walk with.
