Gizem Karakas is a visual artist and cultural worker based between Istanbul and Lyon. 

Her practice explores the emotional, political, and poetic dimensions of everyday life through auto fictional narratives. Working across photography, video, performance, sound, and text, she inhabits the ambiguous space between autobiography and fiction, examining intimacy, memory, and relational dynamics. Her narratives often emerge from small details such as phrases, song lyrics, anecdotes, or fragments of popular culture, which she distills into stories that move between “I,” “you,” and “we,” reflecting on how connections are formed, how memory circulates, and what remains unsaid within shared experiences.

Grounded in a radical subjectivity and a sensitivity to the affective and structural dimensions embedded in ordinary forms of sociability, Karakas often stages herself, friends, or collaborators within performative frameworks that combine auto-fiction, reenactment, and documentary gestures. Humour and melodrama play an important role in her practice, transforming personal fragility into a space for shared reflection. She conceives of art as a relational space in which new forms of being together can be rehearsed, where vulnerability, humour, and tenderness become gestures of resistance and renewal.

Friendship, care, and collaboration form the core of her approach, functioning both as subjects and as conditions of production. She understands collaboration as both an artistic method and a survival strategy, developing collective processes grounded in encounter, exchange, and hospitality. Alongside her individual practice, she has initiated and participated in various collaborative frameworks and artist collectives, including Medyartiz (since 2011), Hayirli Evlat (since 2017) and HAH (from 2017 to 2020).