İz Öztat İstanbul, Türkei, 1981

In her collective and individual artistic practice spanning diverse media defined by her research, İz Öztat explores the persistence of violent histories through forms, materials, space and language. She responds to absences in official historiography through spectral, intergenerational and speculative fictions. İz Öztat fabricates the (auto)biography of Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego. She takes on Zişan’s archives and interprets them through her practice to construct a complex temporality of action that enables the suppressed past to intervene in the increasingly authoritarian present. The values and methodologies driving her practice have been articulated in relation to struggles against the taming of running waters and have been informed by consensual negotiation of power dynamics.

İz Öztat (born 1981 in Istanbul, lives and works in Berlin) studied Fine Arts and Visual Communication Design (MA) at Sabancı University, Istanbul, and Studio Art (BA, with honors) at Oberlin College, Ohio. She was a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Programme (2024–25). Her institutional exhibitions include Near East, Far West, 6th Kyiv Biennial, MSN, Warsaw (2025); these walls are not here to defend us, OFF-Biennale Budapest (2025); Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2023), where her work is also part of the collection; The Colony, Schwules Museum, Berlin (2018); Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); Land without Land, Heidelberger Kunstverein (2016); and the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). Öztat has been an artist-in-residence at the Swiss Institute Saha Residency (2025), the Istanbul–Berlin Residency Program (2022), and SAHA Studio, Istanbul (2021). She has worked at the intersection of art and education in self-organized, institutional, and academic settings. Her academic articles, essays, and fictional texts have been published in various media.