Büyükdere35 is delighted to announce Deniz Ozuygur’s first solo exhibition, Happy Brideday.
Ozuygur explores the blurred boundaries between childhood play, female-specific rituals, and inherited gender roles through sculpture and text-based works made entirely of melty beads.
With works alluding to a cake, tiara, and banner, Ozuygur stages an uncanny hybrid celebration—part birthday, part wedding. In this scene, rituals overlap, meanings become unclear, and familiar expectations are gently challenged. Large wall panels feature real questions asked by the artist’s children: Mommy can you play house with me? Mommy can a baby have a baby? Mommy can I marry you? They offer moments of innocence that carry unsettling truths about womanhood, domesticity, and societal expectations through the images and words carried in a child’s unconscious.
By using melty beads—a material often associated with childhood crafts—Ozuygur turns play into poetry, and decoration into disruption. Happy Brideday invites viewers to examine the rituals we pass down, the symbols we celebrate, and the stories we inherit— whether we mean to or not.
Born in Istanbul and raised in NYC, Deniz Ozuygur is a multidisciplinary artist who studied Fine Arts at NYU. Working across sculpture, performance, text, and photography, Ozuygur addresses themes of motherhood, cultural identity, and feminist critique with humor, material sensitivity, and autobiographical narratives. Her works have been exhibited at various art institutions in Istanbul, New York, Miami, Venice, Lisbon, Dubai, and Warsaw.
Recently, she participated in the 43rd Contemporary Artists Exhibition organized by Akbank Sanat in 2025.
The accompanying catalog text for Happy Brideday was written by curator and art writer Beral Madra.
