Beril Or
Instagram: @berilor
Website: https://berilor.com/
Bio: Beril Or is a visual artist, educator, and curator from Türkiye, based in Oakland, California. Her interdisciplinary works explore time, memory, and healing through rest, moving between comfort and disturbance. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and projects such as CIAM, Marin MOCA, Your Mood Projects, /Slash/room/, SOMArts, Root Division, Berkeley Art Center, Palo Alto Art Center, ICASF, SOEX, Galeri Nev, Zilberman Gallery, Mamut Art Projects 5, and 38. Akbank Contemporary Artists. She received the State Sculpture Award in Turkey in 2009 and the Cadogan Contemporary Art Award in 2019, Sher-Right Award 2021 among others. She is a co-founder of a three-person curatorial collective, MUZ, dedicated to supporting emerging artists. She holds an MFA in Art Practice from San Francisco State University and a BFA in Sculpture from Hacettepe University.
Statement: "In my art practice, I challenge how time is commodified in capitalist societies, proposing that rest, stillness, and quiet moments have value beyond constant productivity. When I moved from Türkiye to the U.S., I was struck by how much pressure people feel to stay productive, even on weekends and holidays. This contrast made me think more about rest as a quiet form of resistance, both political and emotional. I explore how our personal and shared memories shift over time and how they are shaped by the systems surrounding us. I question how time intersects with memory and how capitalist structures manipulate time, tying it to efficiency and output. Historically, the clocks we use today were developed to measure labor, tied to the exploitation of enslaved people; this still continues to shape how we think about time. Through my practice, I disrupt these inherited systems, seeking alternative ways to mark time that aren’t based on control or productivity. I reclaim time not as a commodity, but as something we move with, rather than against. My work asks how we might see time differently, not as something to manage, but as something structured by systems, and therefore possible to restructure. "
