Ceylan Öztrük is an artist who lives and works in Zurich. She completed a practice-based PhD program at the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul in 2016, which she had started in 2014 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna as part of the Post-Conceptual Art Practices program. She received her graduate (MFA, 2011) and undergraduate (BFA, 2006) degrees from the Fine Arts Faculty at Anadolu University. In 2022, she received Swiss Art Award.
Some of her exhibitions and performances are Wearing the Angels, Kissing the Room (Gessnerallee Zürich, 2023); Sculpture Garden (Geneva Biennale, 2022); Matter of non (FriArt Kunsthalle Fribourg, 2021); Orientalien (Gessnerallee Zurich, 2020); Am a Mollusk, too; re/producing Tangents (Longtang Zurich, 2020); IV. Berliner Herbstsalon (Berlin, 2019); Call me Venus (Mars Gallery Istanbul, 2016).
Ceylan Öztrük opens up accepted forms of knowledge and focuses on how it was built to shift a specific flow and thus become tools of the structures of power. She aims to break the flow of information in the mainstream with a multi-disciplinary approach, offering to setup new channels that co-exist with and sometimes replace the existing ones. She creates Autotheory and employs interventions in her practice as a methodology with which she tries to transform existing situations and frameworks.