Lifelong Guest By Cansu Yıldıran

Lifelong Guest presents glimpses of the daily lives, rituals, and past of the Pontic people in a short documentary format. It aims to shed light, through oral history, on the memories, silent stories, and fading traditions of individuals who, perhaps unknowingly, preserve the cultural and historical fabric of the region. It also connects to my own family history and home- town archive. Beyond the place everyone calls home, this work serves as a brief visual visit to the bridge that a community builds between its past and present.

About the artist

Cansu Yıldıran's (They/Them - Istanbul, 1996) art practice can be regarded as a persistent and passionate quest for 'home.' Throughout this journey in pursuit of the concept of home, the stops can be a body, a place, an emotion, friends, or a community.

Yıldıran documents various stories and stages non-normative tales and rituals through visual arts, drawing inspiration from personal experiences as they narrate their stories. While the starting point of their stories may originate from personal connections and concerns, they also draw inspiration from social movements, collective memory and oral history delving and gaining layers through and prolonged examination.

Yıldıran received the FOAM, Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam’s Netherlands Talent Award and Pride Photo Award in 2024, and was awarded the Women Photograph Project Grant, 2022.

In 2021, they placed first in the Resistance category of the All Out Photo Award, a global LGBTIQ+ online activism network, presented with MTV; winning images were displayed over the course of New York and Copenhagen Pride and at exhibition spaces around the world.

Yıldıran was shortlisted for the main prize of the 2021 PhMuseum Photography Grant and selected for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in 2018.

They have exhibited their works at FOAM, Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Netherlands; the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece; Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; Pinakothek der Moderne, Germany; Odunpazarı Modern Museum, OMM, Eskişehir, Turkey; Elgiz Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; Leica Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey; the Arles Photography Festival, France; and the Verzasca Foto Festival, Switzerland. Yıldıran has participated in photography book workshops with publishers Kazuma Obara and Calin Kruse, and received a one-year Women Photograph mentorship from Nicole Tung. Their works have been published in Visa pour I’image, Photography Festival, the British Journal of Photography, Dazed Magazine, the Washington Post, and The Guardian. Cansu Yıldıran is one of the twenty exceptional artists featured in the Foam Talent 2024-2025 Group Exhibition and Foam Magazine Talent 2024-2025 Issue. Cansu continues to work in their studio located in Istanbul.