Tulu Bayar

Tulu Bayar is a Turkish born visual artist whose practice embraces photography, video, installation, sculpture and drawing. She has been experimenting with and employing meditative repetition in her work while also embracing the philosophy of oneness: all the binary concepts are connected to each other. Her art focuses on the spiritual essence of wholeness and mysticism that are deeply rooted in Rumi’s teachings. 

Her studio practice is informed by her experiences as an immigrant artist who occupies an in between space and her multi-disciplinary work is deeply influenced by both her native and adopted cultures. Exoticism, otherness, hybridism, homogeneity, pluralism and containment are some of the concepts that she has been exploring through her multifaceted work. She has been incorporating practices towards blurring the boundaries between strict categorizations as well as binary situations and her work embraces spontaneous possibilities for expression and its direct proximity to the viewer. 

Just like her journey as an immigrant, Bayar sees her artistic practice as a form of thinking and discovering a journey on a contained surface, where she thinks one can never know exactly where it might lead us. Her work draws analogy between how we experience unconscious emotions in the repetition as well as the accumulation of marks and the intonation, hesitation and inflection of sound; both of which occurs independent of sight, then is generated by the mind and mediated by perception. This way of working gives Bayar the privileged relation to the invisible as the work embodies and exposes the thinking process rather than freezing a certain moment or an idea in time.

Her work is a poetic dialog between the traditional and the experimental, embracing a conscious nod to the past with a contemporary examination. Bayar mentions “I usually start each work with a social issue in mind. Gradually the pragmatic develops and disintegrates leaving behind a sense of the assembled material that transcends the literal which then opens a path to connect with the viewers on an emotional level. This is when I assume the work is finalized. “

Tulu Bayar holds a BA from the University of Ankara and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at venues both in the US and Europe with catalogs. Her work is in various public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe. 

A Fulbright scholar, Bayar has received many artist-in-residency grants and fellowships, most notably William Sackett Fellowship from Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Camac Centre d'art Artist-in-Residency grant funded by Tenot Foundation in France and the Center for Photography at Woodstock Artist-in-Residency grant funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Bayar is currently the chair of the Art and Art History Department at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.