SERPIL ODABAŞI
The Captivating Reconstruction
of Serpil Odabaşi
Fall 2026
Serpil Odabaşi reads fiction visually. As she moves through a story, scenes, colours, and fragments begin to form in her mind. By the end, one image usually remains more insistently than the others, and that becomes the starting point. She does not approach the work as illustration. “What matters to me is capturing its atmosphere,” she says, “something of the feeling, tension, or world that the story created in me.”
Odabaşi was born in Turkey and raised in Diyarbakir before moving to Ankara, where she studied Fine Arts at Gazi University. She later lived and worked in Istanbul as a teacher. Her early life was marked by political upheaval and personal loss, and during her university years art developed alongside activism. She later spent three years in the documentation department of a human rights organization, working with testimonies, photographs, reports, press clippings, and records of human rights violations.
That history sits behind a practice concerned with memory, displacement, rupture, and reconstruction. Odabaşi works across drawing, painting, collage, printmaking, and digital media, choosing the method according to what the image requires. “I don’t begin with a particular material, colour, or technique in mind,” she says. “I let the image lead me toward them.”
For U.M. Agoawike’s “LUCY & The Great Darkness,” Odabaşi knew early that a single process would not be enough. She worked with monoprint, collage, and paint, building the piece through layers. Material was covered, torn apart, rearranged, and rebuilt. The method became part of her response to the story rather than simply a question of medium. Her own migration to Canada added another dimension to these concerns. Leaving Turkey meant leaving friends, students, familiar streets, and the small habits of everyday life. She has described migration as a kind of rebirth, followed later by the transformation of becoming a mother. These experiences recur in the work not as autobiography in any simple sense, but as structures: fracture, repetition, covering, return.
Odabaşi is wary of overexplaining an image. She stops when she feels that further resolution would close the work down. “I like leaving something for the viewer to search for, if they want to,” she says.
What she hopes remains is simple: that the artwork and the story continue to occupy the same part of the reader’s memory. That after reading, the viewer might return to the image and recognize something there without needing it fully explained.
A Conversation with Serpil Odabaşi
When you first read a story, what do you look for before you begin making an image?
I think visualization already begins while I’m reading. I naturally read through images, scenes, fragments, colours, or forms begin to appear in my mind as I move through the story. Afterwards, I tend to follow the image that stayed with me most strongly and see where it takes me.
Do you think of your work as illustrating the story, or as responding to it?
I think of it much more as a visual response. Rather than trying to retell the story through an image, what matters to me is capturing its atmosphere, something of the feeling, tension, or world that the story created in me.
What draws you toward certain textures, colours, or forms?
When a story begins producing a series of images in my mind, I start asking myself: how can I capture this most effectively? I don’t begin with a particular material, colour, or technique in mind. I let the image lead me toward them. Sometimes it needs paint, sometimes collage, printmaking, drawing, or several of these at once. I don’t like limiting myself to one technique.
How do you decide what to leave unresolved in an image?
Mostly by instinct. At some point I simply feel that I should stop, that I don’t want to explain that part any further. I like leaving something for the viewer to search for, if they want to. I don’t feel that everything needs to be resolved or explained.
Did any of the stories in this issue change the way you approached the work as you were making it?
“LUCY & The Great Darkness” by U.M. Agoawike did. While reading it, I found myself identifying with parts of it in a way, and I knew that one technique would not be enough for that piece. It needed layers. Things needed to be broken down and rebuilt, taken apart and put together again.
So I worked with monoprint, collage, and paint together. I generally enjoy moving between techniques, but with this particular story the combination felt necessary rather than simply a choice of medium. The process itself, layering, tearing apart, covering, rebuilding, became part of my response to the story.
What do you hope remains with the viewer after they have looked away?
I would like the image to remain in their memory together with the story. Ideally, after reading the story, they might return to the artwork, look at it again and think, “Ah, yes, that’s it. Something like this.” I like the idea that the image and the story can continue to live together in the reader’s memory.
Serpil Odabaşi is a Turkey-born Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. She spent her childhood and adolescence in Diyarbakir before moving to Ankara at eighteen, where she later studied Fine Arts at Gazi University. She subsequently moved to Istanbul to work as a teacher. Growing up within a complex political and social landscape shaped her early understanding of the world. She was still a child when a military coup took place in Turkey, an early rupture she remembers as the moment childhood seemed to end abruptly. Having lost both parents while still young, she was largely raised by her brother, a mathematics teacher.
Art and activism ran alongside one another during her university years. She later spent three years in the documentation department of a human rights organization, working with archives, testimonies, photographs, press clippings, reports, and records of human rights violations. This proximity to the ways lived experience becomes testimony, document, fragment, and trace became one of many layers shaping her relationship with personal and collective memory.
Her path through art has been equally varied. She worked in ceramic studios and over time developed a practice that moves freely between drawing, painting, collage, printmaking, and digital media. Rather than remaining loyal to a particular medium, she tends to follow an idea through whatever material language it seems to require.
As a Kurdish woman and teacher, Odabaşi eventually grew exhausted by the recurring expectation to prove her belonging and loyalty, and by the accumulation of social and political pressures around her. Leaving Turkey meant leaving not only difficulty behind, but also people she loved, her students, familiar streets, and small rituals, down to smoking a cigarette on the ferry. She began again in Canada. Migration became a kind of rebirth; becoming a mother later brought another profound transformation.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, her practice often returns to memory, displacement, rupture, resilience, and reconstruction. Things are layered, fragmented, torn apart, covered, uncovered, and joined again. These processes are not simply aesthetic choices, but part of the way she thinks through images and experience.
Odabaşi holds a BFA in Fine Arts from Gazi University and studied Graphic Design at Toronto Film School. Her work has been presented in more than 30 solo and group exhibitions in Istanbul, Athens, Ankara, Diyarbakir, Izmir, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Toronto. Her images have also appeared on book and magazine covers and on posters for theatre and film festivals. Alongside her studio practice, she works as an art instructor and continues to produce work across different media.