Tulu Bayar & Hayley Ferber: In Conversation

Join exhibiting artist Tulu Bayar in conversation with independent curator Hayley Ferber to explore the themes and processes behind What Remains, What Connects: Stories in Assembly at Amos Eno Gallery, on Saturday, June 20, from 2 – 4 p.m. Together, they will discuss Bayar’s interdisciplinary practice and the material processes used to examine ideas of home, migration, memory, and belonging.
This exhibition at Amos Eno Gallery brings together two of the Turkish-American artist’s recent bodies of work that examine how memory, identity, and belonging are constructed through material, process, and collective experience.

At a moment when migration, authorship, and national identity are being actively contested, Bayar’s work offers a distinct and necessary perspective: one that shifts attention from fixed narratives to lived, shared, and continually evolving experiences of home. Her practice foregrounds collaboration, material transformation, and the accumulation of traces. This proposes that meaning is not singular or stable, but assembled across people, places, and time.

Working across photography and interdisciplinary media, Bayar uses paper, soil, plant matter, photographic transfer, and textile processes to create surfaces that hold both image and residue. These materials are not neutral; they carry embedded histories. Through acts of collecting, layering, transferring, and erasing, Bayar constructs works that operate simultaneously as images and as records of touch, of movement, and of exchange.

The exhibition centers on two interconnected projects. Mosaic: Immigrant Stories is a collaborative, community-based work developed through workshops with immigrant participants. Responding to the question “What does home mean?”, participants share photographs and personal reflections that Bayar translates through transfer processes onto handmade surfaces. Images shift, fragment, and partially dissolve, resisting singular authorship. The resulting works function as both individual artifacts and collective compositions; portraits not of a single subject, but of a shared condition shaped by displacement, memory, and adaptation. The unique book is currently on display at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia through August 2027. For this exhibition, Bayar will present limited-edition rice prints derived from the book.

In Cultivated, developed during a residency in Wyoming, Bayar turns to the land as both subject and material. She creates paper from soil, plant matter, and organic debris gathered on site, embedding the physical substance of place into each work. Onto these surfaces, she transfers wide-angle landscape imagery, bringing together proximity and distance, material presence and visual representation. These works hold a tension between permanence and fragility, and between what is fixed in the land and what is continually altered by time, use, and perception.

Across both series, Bayar repositions “home” as something constructed through relationships rather than rooted in geography alone. Her work proposes that stories are carried not only across borders, but through materials, gestures, and acts of sharing. In doing so, she expands the idea of authorship, inviting multiple voices and histories into the making of each piece.

Bayar’s practice feels particularly urgent now. As debates around migration, democracy, and belonging intensify, especially in the context of the United States’ 250th anniversary, her work offers a quieter but deeply resonant counterpoint. Rather than asserting fixed identities or boundaries, it reveals how communities are formed through accumulation, care, and exchange, and how meaning emerges through processes that are collective, contingent, and ongoing.
About the Artist

Tulu Bayar is a Turkish-born American artist and educator based in Lewisburg, PA. Her interdisciplinary practice spans photography and material-based processes, and has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including in Germany, Denmark, the United Kingdom, France, Turkey, Italy, and China. Her work is held in collections including Belfast Exposed Photography, the Samuel Dorsky Museum, the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, the Textile Museum at George Washington University, and the Samek Art Museum. She is the recipient of numerous grants and residencies, including a Fulbright Scholar Grant, and is currently Professor of Photography and Related Media at Bucknell University.

About Amos Eno Gallery

Amos Eno Gallery has been a fixture in the New York art scene since 1974 when it opened in Soho. The gallery is open Thursdays through Sundays from noon to 6 p.m. and is run by a small community of professional artists, both from New York City and across the country, and a part-time director. ​

The gallery is located at 191 Henry Street between Jefferson and Clinton Streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It’s a 5 minute walk from the F Train’s East Broadway Station and a 10 minute walk from the J Train’s Delancey Street - Essex Street Station.

Amos Eno Gallery's programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Amos Eno Gallery is also funded in part thanks to the generosity of the Joseph Roberts Foundation.

For more information, please contact Gallery Director Ellen Sturm Niz at [email protected].

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