ARTISTS

Arda Asena

Baxter St. Residency (2025)

Interstitial

Asena’s practice is based in photography, sculpture, and textile, and invested in establishing
cross-disciplinary connections. Through the translation of similarideas across mediums, they are
interested in the nuances that emerge through the materiality of each artistic form. Their work
explores the abstraction that occurs in these moments of translation as generative opportunities to
complicate notions of identity, social-cultural experiences and ways of being more broadly.
Abstraction allows for a meditative orientation to the interiorlandscapes of emotions, desires,
vulnerabilities and contradictions we each possess. Asena engages a visual language that attends to
the concept of secretive eroticism, which they use as a reflection on tactics often engaged by queer
people as a mode of survival amidst social and cultural violence. Asena claims illegibility as a critical
stance in their work, affirming the refusal to be read and categorized.

Interstitial, a solo show by interdisciplinary artist Arda Asena, who is working across photography, jacquard weaving, and
sculpture.

“Jacquard weaving has pushed me to question different temporalities collapsing within one medium,”
Asena explains. “It becomes a site of projection, a way to meditate on what the body holds, and to
bury what is overlooked, unspoken, or expected to remain silent.”

Asena’s work transpires through an intricate visual and tactile language, complicating the materiality
of the photograph, and attending to translations across mediums. Texture contains memories,
unarticulated feelings and traces of experiences that have been submerged, yet seep through
unexpectedly. In Interstitial, cross-disciplinary experimentation complicates material boundaries,
underscoring multiplicity in both Asena’s approach to making and the varying modes of engagement
visitors may experience through works.

The tensions of physical and psychic violence etch into the body, burrowing through the psyche and
settling into the recesses of the mind. Itreconfigures ways of being, manifesting through forms that
elude detection and fixed definition. Pain accumulates and we adjust to new realities; moving across
expansive distances from former selves. Sometimes who you were is difficult to recognize.
Quiet is not devoid of sound or action. It accompanies secretive strategies, modes of communication
that circulate below the surface of perception. Interstitial affirms the nonverbal and intangible, where
the depth of feeling resides. Asena proposes the framework of secretive eroticism, tactics that have
long been employed for survival by queer people in the face of social and cultural violence. These
secrets lean into abstraction, forthe traumas of violence exceed representation, too slippery to grasp.

Violence often precipitates mourning, inciting temporal disorientation that may never end but
changes shape. The warp-and-weft structures of weaving continue to generate questions on
structure, contemplating what different mediums hold in theirlayers. Certain elements become
emphasized depending on the viewer’s approach, evoking a presence that may be more acutely felt,
while other aspects of the work recede into a seeming absence.
Asena’s work exists in space molded amidst anticipation and reality, attuned to the gaps. Interstitial
forges an ecosystem of experience, individual and collective. Each visitoris invited to dwell in this
interplay, negotiating the tension and release.