“Ouroboros” (2024), one of five works Tuğçe Arıöz has made under that title, shows two armored figures facing each other, their braided hair rising from the crown of the head and arcing overhead until it closes into a single unbroken loop. The braids meet at the top in a round brass medallion and again at the center, where a hanging chain locks into a wide gold cuff. Worked in mixed media, digital on aluminum, at 16 by 20 inches, the piece is framed and, per the artist, not for sale.
Arıöz describes the piece as a meditation on time. She draws on the ancient image of Ouroboros — a serpent eating its own tail, read across Ancient Egypt, Gnosticism, and Eastern and Western mystical traditions alike as a symbol of eternity and cycles — and reworks it so the coil binds two human figures rather than closing around itself. Armor that should protect becomes, in her telling, what chains its wearers to an endless cycle; the piece asks its viewer to sit with “the imprisoning power of time.”
It extends threads she returns to across her wider practice — Circassian heritage, braided hair as a recurring structural motif, and what she calls the “Art of Imperfection,” pushing a composition toward the gap between intention and accident rather than smoothing it away. Her work has shown at Taksim Sanat Gallery, Evin Art Gallery, Art Istanbul Feshane, and 42 Maslak in Istanbul, and has been featured through Antakly Projects’ curatorial program. A solo exhibition, “Digital Whispers of Memory,” opened at Digitaliseum in Malmö, Sweden, in December 2025 as part of the ART MATTER Festival, and her work is scheduled to appear at the Brussels Art Fair, Paris Art Capital, and the Milan Art Fair.
“Ouroboros,” along with the rest of Tuğçe Arıöz’s work, is on display on her artist profile on Art Fair.
