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Issue Illustrator | Sinejan Kılıç Buchina

Each issue of Up the Staircase Quarterly features an Issue Illustrator, an artist whose work was chosen to pair with and complement the poetry of the quarter.  Issue #49's artist is Sinejan Kılıç Buchina.
Sinejan Kılıç Buchina is a NY based artist and visual instructor. She is of Circassian-Abkhazian ancestry, born in Turkey. She received her B.F.A. in Art in Istanbul, and continued her education with programs in London and Berlin, and completed her MA in New York. Buchina has exhibited in galleries and institutions throughout New York, London and Istanbul, and is currently working on evolving projects in New York, Sukhum and Istanbul.

Artist Statement:
Kılıç Buchina’s work focuses on issues of territories, borders, and displacement. Her interests lie predominantly in transnational identities, the unpacking and questioning of historical narratives, and concepts of belonging. Her works are attempts to address the political and physical aspects of representation. 

Buchina creates work in which she reconstructs the borders of unrecognized countries along their ‘non-existing’ lines, re-evaluating rather than referencing maps of ‘de facto’ states’ real borders. Using the “approved” perimeters imposed by nations engaged in proxy struggles, she chronicles her own creation of territories based on the details of their own exclusion. 

​Buchina uses unconventional materials; animal hair, spices, tea, organic and synthetic pigments, rusted metal, flowers and plants, bonding agents and more, while also incorporating traditional materials such as acrylic and oil paint, ink, pastel and graphite. She collects found materials from her surroundings as well as her travels, and creates rust and other forms of decomposition to form surfaces and texture in her imagery, which is initially familiar but rendered unrecognizable by processes both manufactured and natural, in this sense mimicking the fabricated and evolutionary nature of our boundaries.
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