Ardan Özmenoğlu’s “Make Me Up” at Anna Laudel, Istanbul: The Human Print Against the Algorithm

Open any phone camera and a face can be slimmed, smoothed and re-lit before the shutter even fires. Beauty, once a matter of make-up and mirrors, is increasingly made up by software. Ardan Özmenoğlu’s “Make Me Up” at Anna Laudel, Istanbul, running from 14 November 2026 to 3 January 2027, answers that frictionless image economy with something stubbornly physical: prints made by pressing real objects into real ink, each one impossible to reproduce exactly.

An artist of post-its, neon and popular memory

Born in 1979, Özmenoğlu took both her BFA and MFA at Bilkent University in Ankara. She became known for site-specific screen-print installations on unusual supports — post-it notes, glass, neon tubes — that turn mass-produced, throwaway materials into luminous fields of image. Much of her work draws on Turkish popular culture and collective visual memory: familiar faces, objects and signs that a whole society recognises. Her art is held in collections including Istanbul Modern and Borusan Contemporary, and her previous solo show with Anna Laudel, “This will go on and on”, took place in 2019.

The logic of the unrepeatable print

Printmaking is, by tradition, the art of the multiple: the same plate, the same image, again and again. Özmenoğlu reverses that promise. Her method, as the gallery describes it, is to press everyday objects into ink and onto a surface; through repetition, layering and chance, the results always diverge. The press text sums it up in five words: “Each print results in a unique outcome.” The object becomes a stamp, but the stamp never behaves identically twice — pressure, ink load and the accidents of contact see to that.

That small technical fact carries the exhibition’s argument. In “Make Me Up”, the gallery explains, Özmenoğlu sets her process against artificial intelligence’s power to produce, duplicate and modify images on demand. If a machine can generate infinite variations instantly, what does originality mean? What makes an artist’s identity recognisable? And what is the human hand still worth?

Who is doing the making up?

The new work turns these questions towards the female body. Özmenoğlu examines beauty as something shaped by social expectation, by visual culture and, increasingly, by algorithms capable of reshaping faces and bodies. The title is cleverly double. Read as an instruction — “make me up” — it is what one says to a make-up artist, or now to a filter. Read as a question, it asks who constructs the individual at all: the person herself, the norms around her, or the code running beneath the screen.

There is a neat irony in answering digital manipulation with a technique that depends on contact and accident. Where a beauty filter erases imperfection, an ink print records it; where an algorithm averages faces towards a norm, a hand-pressed image insists on difference.

Anna Laudel and the Beyoğlu scene

Anna Laudel’s Istanbul space is on Kazancı Yokuşu in Gümüşsuyu, on the slope between Taksim and the Bosphorus shore at Kabataş — within walking distance of Istanbul Modern in Karaköy and the galleries of Tophane and Beyoğlu. The gallery also runs a space in Ankara and opens a second Istanbul exhibition on the same day, Bilal Hakan Karakaya’s “Luggage of the Unseen”, which makes a visit doubly worthwhile.

Why it matters

• For collectors: unique prints by an artist already in the Istanbul Modern and Borusan Contemporary collections — works whose one-off nature is part of their meaning.
• For painters and printmakers: a clear demonstration that process can be content, and that chance is an ally rather than an error.
• For anyone living with filters and feeds: a timely look at how images of women are made, and by whom.

Visiting information

Anna Laudel İstanbul, Kazancı Yokuşu No: 45, Gümüşsuyu Mah., Beyoğlu 34437 Istanbul. 14 November 2026 – 3 January 2027; the gallery has not published an opening reception time. Open Tuesday to Saturday 12:00–19:00 and Sunday 12:00–18:00, closed Monday. Phone +90 212 243 32 57. See our Make Me Up listing, the official Anna Laudel exhibition page, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.