Gamze Öztürk (Turkey, 1987) is a Turkish performance artist currently based in the Netherlands, mainly focusing on live art, installation art, and lens-based media (film, photography, etc.) Her works predominantly explore female non-verbal languages in cultural theory. Starting in primitive times, she questions how women talk in restricted social structures. She mainly deals with visualising women's history shaped by a male gaze, focusing on body politics, ritual, narrative and hair. By investigating symbols and motifs used by Anatolian women, she explores a hidden poetic language in handicrafts such as rugs, carpets and embroideries. She uses performance to make art installations that show these ancient rituals, that have been preserved for hundreds of years. Furthermore, she uses human hair as a material that links the woman and her ancestral DNA to express femininity. 

 

She hold a bachelor’s degree in art management from the Yıldız Technical University in Turkey. She is currently doing a master's at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) in the Netherlands. She worked on performative staging in the acting school under the name of ‘Studio Oyuncuları’, led by Sahika Tekand, from 2017 to 2019. She participated in many artist-in-residencies at the P.S. Performance Site in The Hague (2017 and 2019) and DOOResidency in Amsterdam (2021. She was part of the Co-Creation Live Factory: Dissenting Bodies Marking Time, Venice International Performance Art Week at the European Culture Centre in Venice.  

 

​