Dilek Winchester
The Wound is Our Place 

Letters are funny—they contribute to creating words, words that should have meaning and a meaning that should be adding sense to this world. However, letters one by one dismantle semantic meaning reducing language to rhythm, breath and phonetic rupture. Through repetition, elongation and distortion, language becomes heavy and unstable, as though the word itself were struggling under the burden of historical and emotional weight. The artist therefore shifts attention from semantic clarity toward the physicality of pronunciation, exposing language itself as vulnerable, fractured and unable to perform the effect we would like it to have.

Winchester’s work for der TANK is inspired by Emmanuel Zakhos-Papazahariou’s essay Babel balkanique: Histoire politique des alphabets utilisés dans les Balkans (Balkan Babel: A Political History of the Alphabets Used in the Balkans) (1972). There he examines the political and cultural history of writing systems in the Balkans, arguing that alphabets function not merely as linguistic tools but as markers of religion, power and identity. The text examines how seven major alphabets—Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Glagolitic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin—circulated across the Balkans and were used to write many different languages and dialects beyond those for which they were originally developed. The alphabet is not tied to a culture or to a language, but it has been historically used to carry meanings that many different cultures produced. What made everything change then? Nationalism. The author shows how modern nationalism changed the role of alphabets. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emerging nation-states pushed for one official language and one official script, gradually erasing local alphabets and mixed writing systems and multilingual traditions in order to build more unified national identities.

Winchester’s work is both ecological and deeply political. Ecological, because she wants to restore the bio-diversity of the codes and methods historically developed to talk and to transmit, not from inside a culture but between different cultures. And political, because she uses and focuses on the symbolic forms of alphabets to hold to the right of existence, and the radical need to develop cultural and political forms of organization that preserve the complexity of these different religious, cultural and social orders.

We first need to accept and deal with a history shaped by cultural struggle, translation, disappearance and survival, in order to be able to create a political order capable of responding to it.

Chus Martínez

Dilek Winchester
The Wound, 2026
Buttermilk, vinyl film
Size variable

The research-based work of artist Dilek Winchester (lives in Istanbul) investigates how the printed word and typographic space create a sense of belonging. Her interest in the communities formed through publishing ranges from artists’ zines to the hybrid printing world in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire. She focuses on alphabet reforms, the symbolic meaning of alphabets, and the politics of translation. In her curatorial work, she has explored artistic and academic practices shaped by experiences of displacement. The artist completed her undergraduate studies at Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design and her postgraduate studies at Metropolitan University in London and at Marmara University in Istanbul. She currently teaches at Istanbul Okan University. Winchester is currently a resident at  Atelier Mondial in Basel/Münchenstein, by invitation from the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, as part of HGK Basel @ Atelier Mondial, supported by SAHA.

Selected solo and group exhibitions include the 18th Istanbul Biennial (2025); 16th Sharjah Biennial (2025); Salt Galata, Istanbul (2024); IMMA, Dublin (2023); Kunsthaus Hamburg (2020); De Appel Curatorial Program, Amsterdam (2020); Galata Greek School, Istanbul (2018); Aichi Triennale (2016); SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul (2015); SPOT Production Fund, Istanbul (2014); Home Works Forum 6, Beirut (2013); Matadero Madrid (2013); EMST, Athens (2012); and Queens Museum of Art, New York (2009).