Ece Bakirhan
Multidisciplinary artist
ebakirhan899@gmail.com
+31 648550896 (I’m deaf, please message only)
Instagram: @_yimaia
Education
AKI ArtEZ University of the Arts
BA Crossmedia Design [2022-2026]
Radboud University
BSc Biology [2019 - 2025]
Work Experience
Studio Dae Uk Kim
internship [January-July 2025]
AKI FINALS
construction team [June-July 2023; 2024]
Exhibitions/Projects
AKI Finals
graduation show [June-July 2026]
Het Ei
publication of AKI ArtEZ [sept-Dec 2024]
Motiongraphy
MNKMT Ateliers , group exhibition [May 2024]
Saepio
Dyson x Dotplot Creative Challenge [March 2024]
The Little Things
KO(O)RTS Film Festival, Sickhouse [July-Aug 2023]
The Great Unknown
Galerij Objektief group exhibition [June-July 2023]
Artist’s statement
Ece Bakirhan (1998, NL) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores uncomfortable emotions such as grief, anger and heartbreak. A large part of her work stems from curiosity about the world around us and the way we experience it within us. She aims to tell stories through objects, environments, and video, in a way that stays true to herself: through experimentation and the dissection of details. Recently, she has become interested in working with large-scale installations, aiming to create immersive environments that encompass the viewer in order to find a way to simulate the world she struggles to understand within herself.
Though vulnerability has been a central point to her projects, there is plenty of space for wonder and humour as well. Darkness is even more intriguing when it remains vibrant and colourful. That is why her work insists on the persistence of hope.
The artist’s alias, Yimaia, refers to an extinct genus of Ginkgoales, a tree growing in the Middle Jurassic era, at the Yima Formation in Henan. Traces have been found all the way in Europe. It is the only member of the species Yimaiacea, and classified as a form taxon, meaning that its findings were fragmentated. It distinguishes itself from other Ginkgoalean trees by carrying its seeds on the outside, in clusters on a peduncle, exposed and vulnerable.