Profile
Merve Ünsal is an artist and writer based in Türkiye. Merve's practice explores sound, performance, and speculative research to examine collapse, memory, and political violence. Shaped by the history of enforced disappearances in 1990s Türkiye and her own familial ties to the region, her work focuses on sinkholes in the Central Anatolian Plateau as sites of geological and historical rupture. Merve approaches these landscapes as spaces to listen and reflect, interpreting sinkholes as manifestations of slow violence, inward collapse, and institutional denial.
Working with sound installations, radio, performance texts, and artist books, Merve creates speculative field recordings that blend environmental sounds, imagined temporalities, and her own breath. Her radio practice began in 2018 with a broadcast on Açık Radyo and continues to use fiction and listening as tools for political and emotional inquiry. Through these acoustic experiments, Merve treats sinkholes as temporal archives that resist full documentation, tracing how catastrophe unfolds and lingers over time.
