About this Event
Reading and Artist Talk: Tracing What the Sea Alters with Özge Dîlan Arslan
Wednesday, October 7, 2026
6:00 pm at Open Studio
Join us for a reading and artist talk with Özge Dîlan Arslan to mark the launch of Tracing What the Sea Alters, a publication accompanying the exhibition as a parallel site of inquiry. The evening will include a reading from the publication and a conversation about its development alongside the textile installation.
Through writing, visual research, and inscription, the book approaches the Aegean as a living archive, attending to the persistence of passage and submersion within its waters and coastal landscapes. The Aegean archipelago provides both a geographic and conceptual structure, bringing dispersed sites and temporalities into relation without resolving them into a singular account.
Historical research is placed in dialogue with the sea's ecological present, allowing depth to register as both a physical condition and a temporal field. Writing and image create correspondences between what has accumulated beneath the surface and what continues to unfold within the marine environment.
More about the exhibition: Tracing What the Sea Alters .
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Özge Dîlan Arslan (b. 1994, İstanbul) is an artist based in Tkarón/Toronto. Her practice spans printmaking, image-making, writing, archival research, publishing, and curatorial work. Working through material processes, Arslan explores how memory, movement, and histories of displacement register over time, particularly through surfaces shaped by environmental and historical forces. Water, textile, and print recur in her work as forms that hold traces of passage, transformation, and loss.
Arslan is the founder of ASTAR Editions, an artist-run publishing collective. Her recent projects include collaborations with The Asian Canadian Living Archive (TACLA), including the publication Bodies of Knowledge, as well as research and archival work with the Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought and SKETCH Working Arts. From 2017 to 2021, she founded and directed Diaspora Express, a Southwest Asian and North African art collective focused on community-led exhibitions and cultural programming. Her curatorial projects include Threads of Resistance (2022) and Changing the Current (2020).
Arslan holds a joint Master of Arts in Communication and Culture from Toronto Metropolitan University and York University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Media Studies from Carleton University. She is currently a candidate in the Master of Visual Studies (Studio) program at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.
Özge Dîlan Arslan, Tracing What the Sea Alters, 2026. Detail of work in progress. Mixed media: patchworked linen, photographic gel transfers, screenprinted symbolic forms, and sewn elements. Dimensions variable.
Event venue & nearby stays
Open Studio, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto, Canada
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