EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Nazli Efe
Nazli Efe (b. 1989) grew up in Turkey and Cyprus holding both nationalities. She studied Architecture at Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, and Virginia Tech University in Washington DC. After working in creative industries for 5 years she completed her MFA at Pratt Institute in 2022 with high honors. She is an interdisciplinary artist making installations, sculptures, and performances that focus on spirituality and the qualities of Water.
Nazli discusses the dialogue between immateriality and materiality, permanence and ephemerality from a mystical aspect. She adapts and adopts the traditional techniques in her art practice that utilize Water such as marbling, a method of painting on the Water surface, and Molvbdomancy, a divination method that uses Water and molten metals.
Water is a ritualistic, meditative, and performative medium that allows Nazli Efe to access her unconscious mind and manifest the emotional presence of memory in her work. Influenced by the Molybdomancy ritual, in her current study, she creates artifacts of personal history and emergent psychic objects by dropping molten wax into Water. The amorphous wax forms shaped by the Water resemble the Rorschach test evoking her memories. Memory follows form and form follows memory. Nazli collaborates with water, an unstable medium that makes the piece grow in unexpected ways, pushing her to meditate on the idea of control, chance operations, and how the universe works
Nazli is a Member Artist at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program in New York. Her works have been featured in Hyperallergic and Whitehot magazines. She exhibited both in the United States and Turkey.
Photo Credit: Federico Savini