At London’s SUNDAY Art Fair, there is a satellite known as “Frieze” that fosters emerging art talent. There you could find artist Hayal Pozanti cut-out paintings that form a mural spelling abbreviations of “Deny,” “Degrade,” and “Destroy.” It’s a secret message written in her own “Instant Paradise” alphabet, a personal lexicon that features 21 shapes that are repetitious in her artwork.
The 32-year-old Istanbul native grew up around technologically advanced parents, her father a pioneering neurosurgeon in the Middle East and her mother a computer engineer. Pozanti was raised around numbers. She also grew up in an interesting time where she can remember pre-internet. In her interview with Artsy she explained, “I’m from a generation where I remember pre-internet. I know how it immediately affected my life.
From the invention of the steam engine, our society has formed this codependent relationship with technology that at this point isn’t really questioned.”
Her paintings, according to Artsy, as they viewed them in her Long Island City studio before the show, “…are clandestine and serious meanings; data encryption, subliminal conscious, cipher.”
Pozanti is enamored by data collection, becoming a sort of past time for her, she states, “We are coming to a point where we are quoting statistics rather than understanding the world through words, or language or poetry.” This would become the inspiration of her painting our overreliance on technology or our disassociation with physical forms.
She has this interesting idea of keeping things “physical” which accounts for her method of texturing her paintings using jig sawed Dibond aluminum composite material (ACM). She believes that as a society, we rely so heavily on data that could potentially disappear or be manipulated when the written word, a physical entity, would be much harder to manipulate.
The phase, “Deny, Degrade, Destroy,” from her painting at SUNDAY is a term used in British Intelligence seen in military computer warfare.
Acrylic paintings on Dibond aluminum composite substrates
Photography by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy