Ayşe Erkmen’s statement that “art is the only freedom” is not simply a poetic description of her practice. It offers a key to understanding an oeuvre in which sculpture becomes a way of thinking about space, movement, visibility, and the limits imposed on the body. In her recent conversation with Louisiana Channel, Erkmen reflects on a career shaped by experimentation and by a persistent desire to remain free from fixed definitions of what sculpture, or indeed what an artist, should be.
Born in Istanbul in 1949, Erkmen studied sculpture at Mimar Sinan University and graduated in 1977. Her subsequent career developed between Istanbul and Berlin, including participation in the DAAD International Artists Residency Programme in Berlin in 1993 and teaching positions in Germany. Yet her practice has never been easily contained by the conventional category of sculpture. She works with objects, architecture, photography, found materials, technical systems, and temporary interventions. What unites these apparently disparate forms is her attention to space as an active material.
For Erkmen, space is not a neutral container in which an artwork is placed. It is already full of histories, restrictions, possibilities, habits, and invisible relationships. Her intervention begins by observing what is there. Rather than imposing an autonomous sculptural object upon a site, she often allows the site itself to determine the work. As she explains in the Louisiana Channel interview, “Space occupies a very important part in my work… I’m using what the space offers.”
This approach places Erkmen in an important lineage of post-minimalist and conceptual practices, but her work is distinguished by its unusually light touch. Her interventions can appear playful, almost absurd, before revealing a more complex political or phenomenological dimension. She is interested in the moment when something ordinary suddenly becomes strange: a bridge becomes invisible, water becomes architecture, a museum becomes an obstacle, or a simple object begins to expose the systems governing human movement.
One of the most compelling examples is On Water (2017), created for Skulptur Projekte Münster. Erkmen constructed an underwater walkway across the city’s canal. Visitors could walk beneath the surface of the water, moving through a space that normally belongs to boats and aquatic life. The work transformed an apparently familiar environment into an unfamiliar physical experience. More importantly, it turned movement itself into a sculptural medium.
The significance of On Water lies not in the spectacle of constructing something beneath a canal, but in the way the work makes the viewer conscious of their own body. Walking becomes slower, more deliberate, and slightly precarious. The ordinary act of crossing from one side to another is detached from its everyday functionality and transformed into an experience of duration, vulnerability, and orientation. Erkmen has described the work in relation to pilgrimage: the distance is not necessarily great, but the experience of moving through it changes the perception of time and effort.
This concern with mobility also appears in Erkmen’s more explicitly political works. In the Louisiana Channel interview, she discusses an installation involving orange gymnastic balls, where the movement of air contrasted with the restricted movement of human beings. “The air could go everywhere, but people could not go,” she observes. The simplicity of the image is characteristic of her practice. A seemingly playful installation can become a meditation on borders, migration, confinement, and unequal access to movement.
Here Erkmen’s politics are rarely delivered as a direct statement. She explicitly argues that a political message does not have to be “heavy”; it can appear light, even joyful, while carrying a deeper meaning. This is one of the defining qualities of her work. Rather than illustrating a political idea, she constructs a situation in which the viewer experiences a contradiction physically.
Her 2011 work Plan B, presented at the Venice Biennale, similarly transformed an infrastructural system into an artwork. The installation treated Venice’s canal water through a purification system, turning an apparently mundane technical process into a reflection on water, infrastructure, ecology, and the relationship between a city and its most essential resource. In Erkmen’s practice, technology is rarely celebrated for its own sake. Instead, technical systems become almost invisible actors within a larger choreography of human experience.
This interest in the invisible is central to Erkmen’s sculpture. Her works frequently reveal structures that are normally overlooked: the circulation of water, the architecture of a building, the regulations governing movement, the boundaries between public and private space, or the mechanisms that determine who can enter, cross, occupy, or remain somewhere.
Her Between You and I (2011), for example, temporarily covered an art centre in Rotterdam with a turquoise nylon skin. The building remained recognizable, but its relationship to its surroundings was radically altered. The intervention did not create an independent object; instead, it made the architecture itself visible as an object of perception. The familiar became unfamiliar.
This is why Erkmen’s practice can be understood as phenomenological sculpture. Her works are less concerned with producing permanent forms than with producing particular conditions of perception. They ask: What does it mean to walk here? What does it mean to be prevented from moving? What happens when the familiar architecture of a place suddenly behaves differently? How does our perception change when something we normally ignore becomes impossible to overlook?
In this sense, Erkmen’s sculpture is remarkably close to architecture, but it also destabilizes architecture. Architecture traditionally organizes bodies in space: it creates entrances and exits, walls and thresholds, routes and restrictions. Erkmen takes these existing structures and subtly reorganizes them. Her sculpture therefore operates not only in three dimensions but also through time, movement, behaviour, and social relations.
Her attitude toward the artist’s identity is equally significant. In the Louisiana Channel interview, Erkmen questions the importance of the artist’s name and signature, suggesting that when a name is repeated too often, it can disappear. “The work is more important than the artist,” she states. This position is particularly revealing in relation to her practice, because many of her works resist the conventional image of the artist as the creator of a unique, autonomous object.
Erkmen often works with things that already exist. She does not necessarily need to invent a new material; she can transform the meaning of an existing one. A bridge, a canal, a building, a pipe, a container, a ball, or a technical mechanism can become sculptural material once its function is shifted. The artistic gesture therefore lies less in fabrication than in recontextualisation.
This also explains the importance of disappearance in her work. Many of Erkmen’s most powerful interventions are temporary, site-specific, or difficult to possess as objects. They exist as experiences, memories, photographs, traces, or stories. Their disappearance is not a failure of the artwork but part of its conceptual structure. Once the intervention is removed, the viewer is left with a changed understanding of the site.
Erkmen’s approach also challenges the conventional monumentality of sculpture. Instead of producing objects that occupy space permanently, she can make a site itself behave like sculpture. The result is a practice in which sculpture becomes less about mass and permanence and more about relations: between bodies and architecture, movement and restriction, visibility and invisibility, technology and everyday life.
Her statement that art should be free is therefore inseparable from her method. Freedom, in Erkmen’s work, is not necessarily represented by an image of liberation. It is enacted through the possibility of seeing otherwise. The artist creates a small rupture in the ordinary order of things, and within that rupture the viewer becomes free—if only temporarily—to perceive the world differently.
This is perhaps what makes Erkmen’s work so distinctive within contemporary sculpture. She does not treat freedom as an abstract ideal but as a question of spatial and perceptual experience. Who can move? Where can we go? What prevents us from crossing? What structures determine our behaviour? What happens when those structures are subtly altered?
At the same time, Erkmen refuses to turn these questions into rigid political statements. Her works remain open-ended. They can be funny, elegant, poetic, political, absurd, or unsettling, often simultaneously. Their meanings emerge through the viewer’s encounter with the work rather than through a predetermined message.
Her practice ultimately proposes a particularly contemporary understanding of sculpture: sculpture as an intervention into the conditions of experience. The artwork may be a physical object, an architectural transformation, an underwater path, a technical system, or an almost imperceptible alteration of an existing environment. What matters is not what the sculpture looks like in isolation, but what it makes possible—or impossible—for the viewer to see, feel, remember, and do.
In this respect, Ayşe Erkmen’s art is indeed an art of freedom. It creates temporary spaces in which established relationships can be suspended and reconsidered. Her interventions do not necessarily tell us what to think. Instead, they alter the conditions under which thinking becomes possible.
And perhaps this is the most radical aspect of her practice: Erkmen does not give freedom a form; she creates situations in which freedom can be experienced.