About                                                      

Deniz Johns (b. Türkiye; based in the UK since 2003) is an artist and researcher, whose work mainly concerned with formulating an experimental film/video practice that constitutes a political aesthetic. Her recent films and videos investigate the radical political potential of aesthetic negation—through absence, abstraction, distortion, and deconstruction—as a means to disrupt dominant visual constructions and foster critical modes of spectatorship. Many of her works emerge from the tension between a desire to address political atrocities and a scepticism regarding normative narrative structures’ potential to serve as agents of structural change. Her writing also examines the politics of representation, especially concerning the oppressed, and the power dynamics between artwork and viewer in relation to race, gender identity, and agency. 

Her work has been presented at national and international festivals, galleries, and institutions including Over the Real International Video & Multimedia Art Festival (Lucca), Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival (Venice), Cineinfinito (Barcelona), the Goethe-Institut (Glasgow and Ankara), Café Oto, Whitechapel Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, Close-Up Film Centre (London).

In 2012, Deniz co-founded collective-iz in London, with artists and filmmakers Maria Anastassiou, Amy Dickson, and Karolina Raczynski. Since then, collective-iz has programmed and produced significant experimental audio/visual events. The collective’s work has been generously supported by the community of experimental filmmakers and writers in London, including A.L. Rees, Annabel Nicolson, Lis Rhodes, Nicky Hamlyn, Guy Sherwin & Lynn Loo, William Raban, Nick Collins, Simon Payne, Cathy Rogers, Vicky Smith, and institutions, such as The Horse Hospital, Lux/London, Riverside Studies, no.w.here, British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection, to name but a few. These events bring together analogue film projection, live-feed performance, and para-cinematic practices, and foster dialogue between emerging and established artists within the historical trajectory of experimental film and video.

Deniz completed her PhD in Fine Art (Moving Image) at Cambridge School of Art in 2021 (she was awarded a competitive ARU Doctoral Scholarship and the Funds for Women Graduates Grant). She holds an MA in Visual Communication (Moving Image) from the Royal College of Art, and two first-class BA (Hons) degrees: one in Film Studies (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge) and one in Polish Philology (Ankara University). Her background in language and movement subtly continues to influence her work.