Shape Shifter

To combat the oppressive force of the internet, Hayal Pozanti created an original language. In her new show, she moves beyond it.

- Dodie Kazanjian

PORTRAIT OF A MAPLE 

Hayal Pozanti’s A Vessel For My Heart, 2023.

As a graduate student at the Yale School of Art, Hayal Pozanti vowed that she would invent nothing less than a new visual language. She had arrived in 2009, directly from Istanbul, where she was born, and had been caught up in post-internet art—art that uses the internet as its medium. “I was feeling overwhelmed and bombarded by images and information online,” she tells me. “I made a radical decision to not get the internet installed at my house. I needed to wean myself off the computer so that I could go back to the hand and make something new.”

The visual language that she developed over the next decade, called “Instant Paradise,” came from 31 invented, hieroglyphic-like characters, which correspond to numbers and letters in the English alphabet. Her mastery of this language has recently matured from a rigid system of abstract shapes into a joyous world of color and movement. “I started imagining the shapes not as things that are floating around on an empty canvas,” she explains, “but as plants or trees or fictional creatures that exist within a landscape. That’s when it all came alive.” The new paintings are on view this month at the gallery that London dealer Timothy Taylor has just opened in downtown Manhattan.