2026-Ongoing
22x30 inches
Cyanotype Print and Drawing On Watercolor Paper
Some Wayside Wanderings is an ongoing series of large-scale cyanotype works that considers mapping as a living, unstable record shaped by memory and inheritance. Working from maps of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where my ancestors are from, I imagine their lives through blind drawings made with a planchette, a small wooden device historically used in spiritualist séances for guided or automatic drawing. I use it to embody what I carry in my body and subconscious, translating inherited traces into imaginary landscapes and shifting borders. Drawing directly onto cyanotype prints, I reimagine what maps suggest about land, immigration, belonging, and identity, allowing fixed lines to loosen into speculation.
2026
Collaboration Between Asli Narin and Bie Yining
Video and Sound (2021) Asli Narin
Poems (2026) Bie Yining
Created during Mothership NYC Residency, January 2026
Asli Narin’s and Bie Yining’s collaboration began during the Mothership NYC residency in New York in January 2026, where they met and discovered a meaningful resonance between their practices. In response to Asli Narin’s video work “Fragility of Coexistence”, Bie Yining wrote poems that reflect on the temporal ecology of human connection, which have been re-integrated with the original video into this film poem.
Cyanotype and Metallic Paint on Watercolor Paper
8x12 inches
Made for Mothership NYC’s Traveling Tarot Project, this piece is my reinterpretation of the Nine of Pentacles. The Nine of Pentacles is a card about abundance, independence, growth, and enjoying the results of your hard work. It represents prosperity and wealth.
2023-2024
Cyanotype Prints/Public Art-Mural Installation at Arts Council Of Indianapolis until December 2025
Syzygy demonstrates microscopic details of internal body parts intertwined with a major celestial event, the solar eclipse, exploring the profound impact of eclipses on human existence. The blue hues of the cyanotype prints refer to the eclipse's mystical quality, merging the personal and cosmic within the artwork. The term "Syzygy" refers to the alignment or straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system, such as the Sun, Earth, and Moon. Additionally, "syzygy" can be more broadly used to refer to any alignment or conjunction of elements.
Beyond their astronomical significance, eclipses are believed to exert a powerful influence on us physically and mentally. The intense energies generated during these celestial alignments are thought to resonate with our inner selves, stirring emotions and influencing the course of our lives. "Syzygy" thus serves as a visual meditation on the interconnectedness of personal and cosmic energies, inviting viewers to contemplate the subtle yet transformative effects eclipses can have on our individual journeys.
For the Sidewalk Galleries Program, which reproduces Indianapolis-based visual artists’ works as vinyl murals around the city on storefronts, the cyanotype prints were digitized and installed as a triptych mural on the windows of the Arts Council Of Indianapolis in Indianapolis, Indiana. The mural will be showcased until December 2025.
2023-Ongoing
Archival Inkjet Prints and Inkjet Prints On Fabric
Generously supported and funded by
DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award by The Christel DeHaan Family Foundation and Arts Council Of Indianapolis
and
Visual Studies Workshop Project Residency
Hand In Hand is a multi-layered work exploring my ancestors and how our stories are connected. This project is a personal investigation of transformation through migration. It delves into how my ancestors’ immigration has created a cycle of repetition in the family story through family archives, found images, and cyanotype prints. As an immigrant who migrated from Turkey to the United States in 2018, I naturally started to pay more attention to the meaning of being an immigrant and to the cycle of immigration, which was not acknowledged a lot in our family. My great-grandparents migrated to Turkey from Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1910s. Although I have some information about these experiences, the stories still have gaps. Investigating my family's experiences helps make sense of my identity: how migration has shaped my life decisions.
I create a personal history record by imagining the past stories with the present and filling in the blanks through my spiritual perspective to achieve a sense of completeness. Combining family portraits with cyanotype prints produced from found slides showing microscopic views of human body parts (such as blood cells, nerve cells, and uterus), I propose that we embody the experience of our ancestors, whether we know their stories or not. The found street photos show the city of Sarajevo, where my ancestors are from. Erasing the people on the streets with rough gestures and turning the images into black and white, I depict the feeling of the aftermath of a city where a lot of their locals left and immigrated. During the time my family immigrated, approximately 3.5 million Bosnian Muslims left either for Turkey or the United States.
