Deniz Sözen is a visual artist, researcher and educator of mixed Turkish-Austrian heritage. She currently lives and works in Birmingham, UK. Deniz studied Fine art in Vienna and London and completed a practice-based PhD in Visual Arts and Media the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster in 2019. Her multidisciplinary artistic research ‘The Art of Un-belonging’ was driven by the exploration of decolonial methodologies and transcultural narratives. Building on this, Deniz has developed an expanded audiovisual practice that critically explores notions of identity and belonging through opacity and multilingualism, centring collaborative and co-creative processes with diaspora communities.
A recent strand of her research has focused on decolonial archival practice, and the body as the ‘living archive’ of diaspora.In 2022 she was awarded an Arts Council England grant to curate the multilingual digital archival exhibition Maker Unknownexploring gaps and blind spots in the history, categorisation and provenance of non-European artefacts in the Camberwell ILEA collection. Her video installation Surya Namaz was awarded the runner up prize for the Best Practice Awards (audiovisual and installation) by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (2019) and was showcased as part of Soundscapes of Intersectional Encounters (2024) at the Exhibit gallery in Vienna (curated by Ruby Sircar and Zehra Baraçkılıç).
She has been awarded numerous prizes and residencies: in 2016 she was recipient of the Artist in Residence ‘West Balkan Calling’, Public ROOM Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, organised by <rotor> Center for Contemporary Art, Graz. Her work was also awarded the Marianne.von.Willemer. Prize for Digital Media (2014). In 2013-2014 she was recipient of the Artist Residency ‘MAK Schindler Scholarship Los Angeles’, through the MAK Center Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program and an Artist Residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris also in 2014.
In Vienna she works together with the artist Tahereh Nourani on a immersive soundpiece which is presented in the exhibition Ex Voto Mothering Memories, curated by Barbara Mahlknecht, alongside sculptural works by Ana de Almeida & Valeria Pechena.
