Cagla Sokullu (b.1997) is a multidisciplinary artist and poet from Istanbul, Turkey based in San Francisco, USA. Her work investigates the politics of belonging and protest as art. She is especially interested in how the socio-political identity of one’s place can shape one’s self, life, image, and story, how this language of home and its politics can become legible or lost between the lines. Her written and visual work is drawn from the her experiences and upbringing in the politically turbulent climate of Turkey. Pulling images and documentations from their original event and rupture, within her work these visuals are reinvented and reframed to speak not of a single event but to carry vestiges of protest that can apply to protest as a concept and ideology. Erasing the identity of chaos and protest, she hopes to blur the lines of belonging within the image and to universalize them in one common language on a spectrum: violence to festival. The image is both unmade and reinvented, protest is universalized, and from protest as art a new artwork is created to address protest as a meta-critique. 

Sokullu has gotten her BFA from Cornell University, and her Master's on Art History and Curatorial Studies from the University of Chicago with a concentration on contemporary political art and theory. She has exhibited her work at Cornell’s Tjaden Galleries and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, is the recipient of the David R. Bean Prize and Cornell Council for the Arts Grant. She has also been published both in Harvard University’s Persephone Journal and Spires Magazine with her poetry as well as in Cornell’s AAP ASSOCIATION with her body of work HeavyHeart.  Recently, her painting "But Still, Like Dust, I Rise" has been chosen to be exhibited at the Deyoung Museum in their annual show The Deyoung Open 2023.

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