Working on the notion of home since 2012, Soylu grounds her practice in installation. She brings together her works developed within this framework under the series titled And the House Frowned.
And the House Frowned is the opening line of Metin Altıok’s poem The Demolishers Came. Developed through an exploration of the process of a house being dismantled, the series points to an inner dissolution. The sense of disintegration here represents not only physical destruction, but also the disassembly of a life, a memory, and an existence.
Within this series, Soylu’s exhibitions Not Being Forgotten How Strange, Constructing the House Anew, and Remnants from My Grandmother’s House take place sequentially. All of these works evolve from her installation Wallpaper, formed by embedding flowers into concrete. Described by the artist as self-portraits, these works render both fragility and brutality, opening up space to read nuances and what lies between the lines.
In Upended, Soylu revisits Constructing the House Anew (2016) from today’s perspective. The exhibition is structured around a fragment of a 300-square-meter installation, reconfigured ten years later. In this installation, the wall descends onto the floor, while the ground gradually disintegrates under the viewer’s steps. What is assumed to be stable becomes fragile, while the surface is reconfigured on another plane.
Upended points to a condition in which the distinction between foundation and surface loses its certainty. Soylu traces this transformation over time, within a space where the personal and the collective can no longer be separated.