Biography
Deniz Demirer (born in 1997 in Istanbul) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and artistic project coordinator based in Paris. Her practice explores the relationship between the body and its environment through themes such as sexual violence, the place of women in society, and resilience. Plaster holds a central place in her work, serving as a material through which she captures the imprint of the body as a sensitive trace, somewhere between memory, presence, and transformation.
Coming from a family environment deeply connected to art, she developed an artistic sensibility from an early age, notably shaped by the legacy of her great-grandfather, Ferruh BaÅŸaÄŸa. She pursued her studies in visual arts at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, where she earned a Bachelor’s degree, a Master’s degree in Visual Arts, and a second Master’s degree in Arts and International Creation. Her graduate research focused on feminist art in Turkey and the Istanbul Convention. In this context, she collaborated with the Mor Çatı association in Turkey to develop an artistic project based on testimonies from women who had experienced violence.
During the 15th Istanbul Biennial, she assisted Latifa Echakhch, Yonamine, and Young Jun Tak in the production of their works. She then worked at the Pera Museum as lead researcher for an exhibition dedicated to Sergei Parajanov, in collaboration with the artist Sarkis. She later coordinated the documentary series Benim Sanatım, dedicated to Turkish artists and produced for the NTV channel. She subsequently served as Head of Artistic Projects at Ellia Art Gallery, which specializes in street art. During her master’s studies, she was also project coordinator and curatorial assistant at Sorbonne ArtGallery, where she contributed to several exhibitions exploring the links between art, photography, and artificial intelligence.
She also curated and managed La Poésie du Chaos, a monumental open-air exhibition by the artist Onay Akbas, presented on the façades of the Caserne Napoléon in Paris in collaboration with the City of Paris, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of his artistic practice.
In 2024, she presented her work in the group exhibition (IN)ERRANCE IV at BIS in Paris, and collaborated with Numéro Netherlands on a fashion shoot centered on freedom of expression. In 2025, she was invited as a guest artist to the exhibition Ä°lk ve Son at Bodrum Art.
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STATEMENT
The female body is neither a surface, nor an image, nor a territory available for use. It is a site of memory, tension, and resistance. It bears the traces of what society projects onto it: norms, control, violence, silences, and imposed roles. But it also carries what escapes these mechanisms of domination: the strength to survive, the capacity to transform injury, and the possibility of reclaiming one’s own presence.
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What is inscribed in the body does not disappear. It remains in a posture, in a tension, in a way of standing, protecting oneself, breathing, and inhabiting space. The body retains the memory of what it has gone through. In this way, it becomes the archive of an intimate and collective history, marked both by vulnerability and by resistance.
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To refuse objectification is to refuse reducing the female body to its appearance, its function, or its availability. It is to restore to it its density, its opacity, and its complexity. It is to assert that it is not offered as an object to be looked at, but as a presence to be acknowledged. A presence charged with experience, memory, and meaning.
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Plaster appears here as a material capable of holding this presence in its most fragile and most irreversible form. It captures an imprint, a breath, a tension, the weight of a moment. The point is not merely to reproduce a form, but to preserve a trace. A trace of contact, passage, and memory. In the casting, something of the body persists, even in its absence. Yet plaster is not a fixed material: over time, it changes, becomes more fragile, bears marks, and transforms. Like bodies, it moves through duration, carries the effects of time, and retains within itself the signs of change.
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What then appears is not a frozen body, but a presence transformed into matter. A presence that resists erasure. A presence that affirms that the female body is not a site of possession, but a living place traversed by history, injury, and power. To bring forth this trace is to make visible what remains, what persists, what continues to exist despite everything.
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