Ceyda Oskay
Ceyda Oskay is an artist, humanitarian consultant, fashion and textiles designer. Her work, spanning various media and locations, is often experimental, and often about migration and place. Her Talisman T-shirts, Blue Dream, and workshop Altering Pillows for Insomniacs all reference sleep. Much of Ceyda's practice revolves around how we are transformed through travel, interactions, sleep, chance encounters, dialogues, meeting, exposure, conversation, and clothes. Ceyda obtained an MA at the Royal College of Art (RCA), Public Sphere - Contemporary Art Practice Department, a BA from the University of Chicago, with coursework from the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) and worked for the United Nations for over ten years before coming back to art. She runs her own fashion brand cc by co (custom clothing by ceyda oskay), making creative, healing clothing for artists for art openings, and more.
Ceyda has exhibited her work in London, India, Iceland, USA (Illinois and Michigan), Kuwait, Turkey and her work is in private collections across the world. While she works across various mediums, textiles are especially important to her practice as per their linkage to migration: often being the few items light enough to carry on journeys. They are also important as markers of memory and often the body.
Sleepdust: Uber Drivers Singing Lullabies, 2019 (includes sound recordings) The work includes audio files of Uber drivers in London singing the artist lullabies during March 2019, when she broke her leg and had to take Ubers to the Migration Museum, as she was the resident artist there during their exhibition.
Ceyda uses textiles to explore symbolic themes around migration experiences, inviting us to engage with more abstract concepts and reminding us that individual migration projects are shaped by more than the structural dimensions of poverty or conflict. Her interest revolves around the exploration of dreams, utopias, dystopias in migration experiences, and her artistic practice features a unique use of textiles, imprints and interactive spaces.