Hilal Can
Hilal Can completed her master’s degree in 2012 at the Department of Painting within the Fine Arts Institute at Anadolu University. Afterward, she taught classes in the same department for a period of time. The following year, she worked as an art instructor for eighteen months with socially challenged students at Hellebaek School in Denmark. Her illustrations were published in various magazines during this period.
Her first solo exhibition, “All that’s left,” took place at the gallery of the Lithuanian National Commission for UNESCO in Vilnius with the support of UNESCO and the Turkish Embassy.
She has participated in various artist residency programs in France, Spain, and Italy at different times. She has showcased her works in various group exhibitions and performances in cities such as Berlin, Copenhagen, Strasbourg, Avinyo, Marseille, and Istanbul.
Her second solo exhibition, titled “Night Roamers,” is currently ongoing at Haliç Sanat, 2nd Fener Evi, with the support of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.
Hilal Can continues her artistic practises at her studio in Istanbul, Galata.
My productions emerge as a reflection of my life journey and past experiences. In general, they are fed by the psychological process that modern human encounters on the way to becoming an individual. In this production process, which I mostly find healing, sometimes the answers I seek appear on the surface in front of me and with the material in my hand.
The conflict of the changing reality surrounding me, the external reality that I was exposed to beyond the geographies I lived in and the inner reality that has formed and will continue to form with my past has driven me to seek a reality/ities beyond what I see.
The production process that I have not left since my childhood shows that I could only understand the life I was born into with the tools of self-knowledge that I found important on the way to being an individual. While understanding myself is shaped as the most important journey leading to the liberation of my essence in parallel with the need to understand my position in the universe, I continue my journey of “I am” through production and expression, by contacting my existence process, which is shaped by different psychologies deep inside, and using art as a tool.
In my art practice, which continues to flow in front of me as a developing and transforming process, I have not separated any disciplines & instruments that I like – that allow me to touch my emotions, help me empty them and embody them – and they all continue to merge as different parts of the same reality in the end
