Selver Yıldırım

Selver Yıldırım (1993) is an artist based in Istanbul. Her multi-layered practice spans painting, digital media, textiles, and found objects, rooted not merely in visual aesthetics but in a political question: What is reality, and for whom does it hold true?

Yıldırım’s work navigates themes such as simulation, memory, the politics of desire, and the representation of the body. She builds a language that oscillates between pop culture and critical theory, working both conceptually and intuitively. She distorts the familiar, rendering the everyday grotesque.
Her work is marked by inner contradictions: it is at once heavy and light, transparent and dense, personal and structural. Defining herself as a “painting laborer,” she approaches production as a form of embodied labor.
Technically, she primarily works with hyperrealistic acrylic painting, while also producing digital collages, video works, and airbrush pieces on textile surfaces. Her engagement with surfaces goes beyond traditional canvases, often incorporating industrial materials such as metal, fabric, and plastic.
Her interdisciplinary approach is shaped by a queer-feminist perspective; rather than aestheticizing images, she aims to expose them—less to narrate than to leak.