Biography
I am Bengi Buse Altun (b. 2004, Istanbul, Türkiye), a London-based artist who graduated in 2026 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art: Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
My work returns to the body, identity, perception and existence, asking whether the gendered body is a subject or an object, how it is observed and how it performs. My recent work treats identity as construction: the masks we wear, the roles we inhabit and the versions of ourselves we produce for others.
Working across sculpture, drawing and painting, and combining traditional materials with new technologies, I am drawn to the moment an object appears to possess life, occupying an ambiguous space between the real and the artificial. Rather than imitating life, I am interested in this state of suspension, where the body becomes something unstable, performed and perpetually becoming.
Project Statement
Smile began as a self-portrait. As I made it, the face drifted away from me and became something else: a head on a plate, grinning at whoever walks in. Cast in silicone, with pores, flush and stray hair worked by hand, it looks alive enough that you expect it to blink. It doesn’t. That fixed, uncanny smile is the point.
A smile is one of the first things we offer the world, and one of the easiest to fake. Here it sits between warmth, authenticity and performance. Without a body, the face becomes both subject and object: something to be looked at, served up and consumed.
The installation sets this head on a distorted, fleshy table, with a stool pulled up in front of it. The scene is domestic and familiar, but the table has warped and the place at it is waiting for you. The recognisable and the strange sit side by side, and the viewer is drawn into the meal.
Smile asks a simple question: what faces do you put on, and who are they for?
