About Seçil Güven

Artist statement

My practice begins with curiosity about the relationship between the personal and the world around us. I work through experimentation, using accessible materials and tools to explore how ordinary things can carry political, social, and environmental meanings.

My ongoing series respond to contemporary conditions while remaining rooted in personal experience. I am interested in the spaces where private narratives meet collective realities; where questions of identity, place, memory, environment, and belonging become intertwined.

Rather than beginning with a fixed outcome, I often allow the material and the process to shape the work. Experimentation becomes a way of thinking: testing, transforming, combining, and sometimes disrupting familiar materials and ideas. Through this process, I seek a balance between openness and conceptual clarity.

Living and working across different cultural contexts has also made cultural exchange an important part of my practice. I see art as a space where different experiences can meet, question one another, and create new ways of understanding our shared world.

Biography

Seçil Güven is an international artist and educator based in Amsterdam. She holds a BFA from Marmara University in Istanbul and has developed a practice shaped by experimentation, cultural exchange, and an interest in the relationship between personal experience and broader social realities.

Working with accessible materials and tools, Güven creates experimental and conceptually driven works that engage with contemporary environmental, political, and social issues. Her ongoing series move between the intimate and the global, using everyday materials and personal narratives to reflect on larger questions of place, identity, memory, and collective experience.

Alongside her studio practice, Güven works as an educator, bringing experimentation and critical thinking into her teaching.