Mommy, can I build my house on your grave?

$5,020.00

Deniz Ozuygur
Mommy, can I build my house on your grave?, 2025
fuse beads
27½ x 38¼ in.
70 x 97 cm

Deniz Ozuygur
Mommy, can I build my house on your grave?, 2025
fuse beads
27½ x 38¼ in.
70 x 97 cm

Deniz Ozuygur (b. 1986, Istanbul) is a Turkish-American multidisciplinary artist based in Istanbul. Working primarily in fuse beads, a children's craft material, she builds large-scale text works that examine motherhood, labor, gender, and cultural identity. Humor, wordplay, and the friction between private life and public language run through all of her work. Her series Mommy? (Anne?) began when her daughter asked: "Mommy, did you used to be an artist?" That question prompted a reflection on the loss of selfhood of the mother. Each panel uses her children's questions as source material, rendering a single question in approximately 30,000 plastic beads fused by ironing, transforming a mundane domestic chore into a private protest. Before returning to her studio practice, Ozuygur worked in advertising as a copywriter, a background that continues to shape her attention to phrasing, slogans, and the way language conditions desire. Raised in New York City and based in Istanbul since her mid-twenties, she draws on her bicultural background to reflect on belonging, cultural codes, and the roles assigned to women and girls. Recent exhibitions include her solo show Happy Brideday (Büyükdere35, Istanbul, 2025), the AKBANK 43rd Contemporary Artist Award Exhibition (Akbank Sanat, Istanbul, 2025), and From Fragments to Coherence (Sevil Dolmaci Gallery, Dubai, 2025). Her work has been included in NADA's online exhibition As It Unfolds (2025). Ozuygur holds a BFA from New York University.