Growing up between different cultures and languages, Yamo Aydemir bases her artistic practice on exploring language, belonging, and embodied memory. Within her works, combines autobiographical fragments with everyday materials, searching for forms that carry silence and fragility. Through video works, installations, and staged environments, she creates spaces in which identity slips, irritates, or reshapes itself. Her work unfolds between the spoken and the felt, the familiar and the inherited, creating poetic compositions that allow for ambiguity. Rooted in personal memory and its intersections with cultural and geographical dislocation, Aydemir follows the threads object and their resonant memories.
Talking to God is a multimedia installation in which Aydemir revisits her family history exploring heritage, memory, and connection. Building on her previous work with the same title, Talking to God draws inspiration from the artist’s Japanese mother’s Shinto beliefs, where every object, like each grain of rice, holds a god.
Building from her family heritage, harboring Japanese and Turkish cultures, the two channeled video creates a dialogue between two cultures. Commenced after a journey to her Turkish father’s homeland near the Georgian border, Aydemir questions the familiarity of an unknown space, and the remoteness of ones roots. Combining documentary footage, text, family audio, and Anatolian landscapes, language becomes a site of encounter. The poetics of fragmentation navigate intergenerational memory and trauma. This elemental triad of stone, snow, and raven negotiates presence and absence, creating a sensory experience where ancestral histories and present distances coexist in a profound dialogue.