Selin Nisa Açıkel Turkish
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Selin Nisa AcikelSearching, 2025Charcoal on paper30 x 30 cm -
Selin Nisa AcikelVeil, 2025Charcoal on paper30 x 30 cm
Selin Nisa Açıkel is a Turkish artist and material-led architectural designer whose work focuses on reuse systems, environmental processes, and the persistence of memory in material form. In her Veil series of charcoal drawings, she draws from her Circassian-Turkish family heritage, a community displaced from the Northwest Caucasus in the nineteenth century and resettled across Anatolia. Tracing the gradual thinning of cultural transmission, her work treats portraiture as a way of registering temporal, fragmentary forms of remembrance. She lives and works in London.
Selin Nisa Açıkel is a Turkish artist and material-led architectural designer with a focus on reuse systems and environmental processes. In both her design and artistic practices, she investigates how materials carry histories, and how memory can persist in altered, reused, or fragmented forms. Her Veil series of charcoal drawings draws from her Circassian-Turkish family heritage, rooted in a nineteenth-century displacement from the Northwest Caucasus and resettlement across Anatolia.
Veil develops from an inherited condition of partial transmission, where cultural continuity has been sustained through dispersed practices rather than a stable, linear narrative. The drawings trace the gradual thinning of cultural memory across generations, engaging portraiture as a temporal condition shaped by erasure and return. Faces appear in fragments, recalled rather than directly observed; the series treats drawing as a way of registering traces that endure beyond narrative clarity, holding presence and disappearance within the same visual field. Açıkel currently lives and works in London.
