Bio

Işık Kaya is a lens-based media artist whose practice explores the ways in which humans shape the contemporary landscape. She focuses on traces of economic infrastructures to examine politics in built environments and how humanity’s dominance over nature finds its manifestation in everyday architecture. In her work, she erases the physical distance between existing structures and creates dense compilations of industrial fragments to construct new landscapes that look both alien and familiar at the same time. By framing her subjects exclusively at night, she aims to accentuate the artificial and uncanny qualities of urban environments.


Işık Kaya holds an MFA degree in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA degree in Photography & Videography from Istanbul Bilgi University, where she studied with a full scholarship. She has participated in exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland), Die Digitale Dusseldorf (Germany), Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), Royal Geographic Society (UK), CEAAC (France), Galerie de L’Escale (France), CICA Museum (Korea), and San Diego Art Institute – ICA San Diego (USA) among others.