Sinejan Kılıç Buchina
A Line Between Integration and Diaspora, #8, 2017
acrylic, oil, pastel, ink, spices, glue on masonite
48 X 36 inches
Necessary Ingredients, #2, 2018
acrylic, pastel, ink, wheat paste, spackling paste, glue on canvas
54 x 48 inches (diptych)
Sinejan Kılıç Buchina is an artist, and a visual educator. She received her B.F.A. in Art Education from Marmara University in 2006, then completed the “Isms in the 20th Century” course in London in 2009. Further, she was selected as a resident curator at the Node Center in Berlin in 2012 and has finished her M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies at City College of New York in 2019. Living, studying and working in all of these cities has given each its own place in her practice. Sinejan was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey but as an ethnic Circassian, she has always been “the other” in her own home and has been an outsider everywhere she's ever lived. This upbringing and ongoing reality is reflected in her practice and is a continually evolving source of both contemplation and inspiration. Buchina has, for the last several years, been exhaustively working on a series focused on time, material growth and social diaspora. Her practice relies on her personal history and traditional artistic education while also striving to break from both. Reminiscent of a relief, she uses thick and heavy materials on canvas to the point where the work moves into the territory of assemblage, highlighting the cracks of the layered paint, the bumps and bruises, the footprints of wounds, thoughts and gesture. The artist’s works are examining our era under a microscope to depict depravity and resurgence, mold, rot, and deterioration as machines which have been abandoned to decay and rust and thus take on a new form and purpose. These melodramatic and nihilistic notions bring with them their own optimism as the wounds inflicted as cracks and scars are integrated into a canvas. Sinejan examines the conceptual dilemma of painting by using uncommon painting materials such as spackling paste, spices, pigments extracted from food, binding agents, natural inks and more, while still maintaining the canvas as her foundation.