Betül Aydın
Betül Aydın
BIO

Betül Aydin is a visual artist born and raised in Turkey, holding a PhD in Media Informatics and Visual Computing from France, and currently based in Germany. Her practice investigates memory, family, belonging, and the emotional landscapes of personal and collective experience, examining how identity is shaped across generations through inherited narratives and domestic environments.

Since becoming a mother of two, she has increasingly engaged with the maternal psyche and the politics of care, exploring how lived experiences of motherhood intersect with societal expectations and normative ideas of family. A recent Goethe-Institut residency extended this inquiry toward migrant motherhood and queer belonging, examining the care networks people construct when legal and social structures offer limited support.

Working at the intersection of conceptual and documentary photography, Aydin creates images that weave intimate personal narratives with broader cultural and political questions.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Photography, as I practice it, is an act of making visible what social, legal, and cultural systems often leave unacknowledged: the labor of care, the knowledge held in aging bodies, the forms of belonging that people create when recognition is limited or denied.

My work arises from lived experience as a woman, a migrant, and a mother, and from a sustained inquiry into how patriarchal, institutional, and cultural forces shape and constrain identity. I am drawn to the lives and spaces that fall outside dominant narratives of productivity, family, and home — and to what those lives carry across generations, often without recognition.

My images emerge from this tension: between inner truth and external demand, between belonging and displacement across borders, between the knowledge the body carries and the roles it is asked to perform. Drawing on family archives, domestic spaces, personal histories, and material traces, I create photographs that hold these contradictions, transforming lived experience into shared recognition.