Hale Ekinci (b. 1984 in Karamursel, Turkey) is a Chicago-based Turkish interdisciplinary artist and Assistant Professor of Art at North Central College, teaching a variety of courses in the Digital Art field. She spent her childhood and much of her young adult years in Turkey, a homeland brought in and out of focus throughout her works. She completed her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago. Focusing on narrative and intercultural connections, her works vary from illustration and mixed media collage to video and installation.

During her residency in Berlin and her international travels, Hale Ekinci photographs homes, habitats, architecture, statues, and people from all aspects of life and collages them into mixed-media drawings. Through the combination of illustration with digital collage transfers of these photos, she crafts colourful and symbolic pattern-based images on paper. Cultural traditions, political issues, mutated memories, idioms, and translations are the backbone of her work. Personal experiences and current social issues embellished with made-up Kafkaesque details along with old shamanistic rituals make the basis of the non-linear stories she tells in her work. She creates interconnected forms that combine the reality of daily life at different locales in a way that intertwines different people, architecture and sociopolitical issues, using mixed-media drawings that explore these relationships through visual metaphor. In a way she translates each culture’s narratives of the human condition into visual concoctions that together reimagine and guide a connected global human experience.

Applying similar techniques of collage to the moving image, Ekinci also worked on the video art project “Almanci (Germaner)” (see below) for her Residency work at MOMENTUM. Based on an original story she wrote during her time in Berlin, the video takes place at a Turkish traditional ceremony of “asking permission to marry”, and explores the stereotypes of Turkish immigrant identity as seen from both Turkish and German perspectives. Using a combination of field video, green screen, still images, and drawings, she crafts a magical realist world where family relations, identity stereotypes, rituals, and women’s issues result in a tense scene that reflects the universal bizarreness of traditions and stereotypes.