Esra Nesipoğulları (b. 1991, Turkey) is a Turkish artist who lives and works in Mantua, Italy. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul and a master’s degree in Architecture and History from the Polytechnic University of Milan. In 2026, she participated in the Creative Synergies – Mentorship & Research Development Program organised by All About Curating (AAC), Berlin. Working across a range of media, including video, digital drawing, textiles and embroidery, Nesipoğulları explores the intersections between language, migration and material memory. Drawing on her architectural background, she investigates systems of structure, translation and visual communication. Her recent exhibitions include: Printed Nostalgia, 2025, Doha Fire Station – Gallery 4, Doha, Qatar; Invisible Structures, 2025, Monk Art Gallery, Izmir, Turkey; and 1989: The Postcollapse in Art and Culture, 2023, Cerritos College Art Gallery, Los Angeles, United States.
For I CANNOT READ WHAT I WROTE (2026), Esra Nesipoğulları constructs an original digital alphabet in which every letter of the Latin alphabet is replaced by a symbol designed and encoded by the artist. By establishing a correspondence between the familiar and the invented, she is able to write normally while producing a text that neither she nor the audience can read. The structure of language remains intact, but meaning slips away, shifting into a visual field in which writing becomes rhythm, pattern and image.
The work originates from a deeply personal text, written as a stream of consciousness, whose content is deliberately withheld from the viewer. Rather than inviting us to interpret what has been written, Nesipoğulları redirects our attention towards the act of writing itself and the fragile mechanisms that make understanding possible. The title contains a subtle irony: at the very moment the text takes shape on the screen, the artist becomes estranged from her own words, sharing the same experience of linguistic exclusion as her audience. It is a gentle, almost sarcastic gesture that transforms communication into a shared condition of uncertainty.
At the heart of the work lies a reflection on the diasporic experience and the unstable relationship between language and identity. For those who live between multiple linguistic and cultural contexts, expression often becomes a continuous process of translation, in which mastery of a language never entirely coincides with a sense of belonging. By rendering language illegible without destroying its syntax, Nesipoğulları demonstrates that meaning is never fixed, but is instead constructed through systems, conventions and processes of recognition.
Accompanied by the mechanical sound of typing, I CANNOT READ WHAT I WROTE becomes an intimate experience in which language occupies the threshold between code and emotion. Writing is stripped of its most immediate communicative function and restored as a material gesture: an architecture of signs that speaks less through what it says than through its very inability to be fully deciphered.
Text by Valeria Conti