Dilara Miller

Dilara Miller is an artist based between Mersin, Turkey and Boulder, Colorado who is a BFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dilara’s work reflects on the social and cultural burdens of being from both a biracial identity of Turkish/American as well as being a woman in Turkish society. Her work attempts to voice her struggles of growing up in the country while exposing it’s taboo’s as well as its expectations of women. She strips properties of her familial and personal history while tying them to common imagery from her own region and culture. In life we are faced with continuous sets of imagery that may mean nothing in the moment but in the future can hold symbolism for us. Dilara takes these themes to understand her own identity and her position within the cultures that surround her.

My work is a symbolic documentation of my biracial identity, my familial history, and societal/cultural pressures of being a woman in Turkey. I am half Turkish and half American and was born in Adana, Turkey and primarily raised an hour away in a port city named Mersin, Turkey. These two locations are drenched in history both in the near present and in the past, primarily focusing on attitudes towards women stemming from Islamic influences and taboo’s. My intention is to take my environment and apply it to an explanation of why those surrounding me behave the way they do, explorations of my own devoutness and past devoutness as well as exposing the confusion and conflicts within my family and those surrounding myself. My work longs to look for an answer, I attempt to remember memories/stories that now hold a new meaning with a new answers. In Turkey I look around and I see these common traditional habits, environmental symptoms, and social attitudes that reflect the social complexities the society withholds. Through the lives of my mothers and my grandmothers I try to understand the way my family reacts to my actions as well as why society is confused by my existence. Imagery like the land I was born on is non neutral, everything has a meaning to it, I search through these created symbols to understand why my sisters flinch. For I am not the only one that has been faced with my environments burdens.

Email: dilara.a.miller132@gmail.com

Website: www.dilaramiller.com

Instagram: @Vishneli