Ayten Pehlivan



PALAVRA 2023


PALAVRA is a photopoetry project presented both as a book and as an exhibition. It is inspired by the dual meanings of the word palavra from the Turkish “untruthful, long and empty talk,” to the Latin “word” or “speech.”

The work explores love, loss, and the metaphysics of longing, reflecting on incompleteness and the evolution of desire, and on the shifting concept of love in language and time.

The photobook contains photographs of dead foliage that had poems typed onto them using a typewriter, accompanied by short texts. With each keystroke, the fragile leaves absorbed the letters, the impressions accumulating until they became poems, revealing both the vulnerability of the material and its quiet capacity to carry the weight of language. Writing required careful attention to each leaf’s contours and fragility; the poems followed their shapes, shaped by the material rather than imposed upon it.

The accompanying exhibition presented the leaves as physical objects, openly pinned within frames and left exposed rather than protected. Viewers were required to approach them intimately, to look closely in order to read the poems, following the curves of the leaves, tracing language through shifts of light and shadow. Emphasizing fragility and impermanence, PALAVRA frames decay as a shared process, in which the poems embedded within the body of the leaf decay together with it, binding language inseparably to flesh.








Terra Rossa (ongoing)



Terra Rossa is a material and poetic exploration of soil, memory, inheritance, life, and death.

The work began with red earth collected from the artist’s mother’s village in Cyprus, which was dried and ground into pigment to paint white cotton cloth. Photographs and poems will be printed onto these surfaces and later stitched together by hand. 

The project reflects on how the earth holds human history from the creation of the first human from clay to the act of returning to the soil after death. The use of white cloth refers to the burial shroud, kefen, used in Turkish Cypriot tradition, life and death. Through poetry and photography, Terra Rossa examines the enduring connection between human and earth.