Yagmur Karaman

Yagmur Karaman is a London-based moving image artist and animator working across 2D animation, 3D art, stop-motion, live action, and projection mapping. She graduated from the University of the Arts London with a BA in Animation. Her practice combines experimental techniques with social and political themes. Throughout her career, she has contributed to commissioned short films, music videos, public projection installations, and collaborative exhibitions in the UK and internationally. Her work often brings together tactile materials and digital processes to create visually layered experiences
that reflect personal stories in connection with wider social issues in modern society.

As an artist, visual activist, and multimedia animator, my work explores social and political issues through mixed-media moving image. With a passion for storytelling, I create films that combine various techniques and styles, including 2D animation, 3D art, live action, and stop motion. My experimental approach pushes the boundaries of what animation and audiovisual experiences can be. My practice focuses on blending digital and physical techniques to build sensory visual experiences. I especially love collecting visual inspiration from the tactile materials around me. By combining different textures, I create uncanny, layered worlds that reflect the complexity of the subjects I explore.

1-    As a London-based moving image artist and animator across 2D/3D animation, projection mapping, and digital compositing, your work spans commercial projects (Blinkink, SubTV) as well as site-specific public projections. How does this versatile background inform your critical approach to the body as an editable, digital artifact?

 My diverse experience in creating digital projects allows me to deeply explore and understand the body as an editable digital artefact. Through my previous projects, I have gained meaningful insight into how figures, motion, objects, stories, and the self can be digitalised

2-    Your practice explicitly investigates how identity and human behavior are repeated, tracked, and
reconstructed through screens. How do you view the relationship between physical human labor and its
virtual avatar in contemporary digital culture?

-I think digital culture and technology often hide the physical effort behind labour and make production look clean and effortless. The exhaustion of the human body can disappear behind screens and systems. I am interested in bringing that physical reality back into the digital image.

1-    In "Organ Mines," you present a digital sculpture that collapses the boundary between the worker's body and the workplace, turning flesh, labor, and machinery into a single fragmented virtual form. What led you to visualize the human body as an extraction site or industrial mine under capitalism?

I wanted to show how capitalism often separates labour from the body performing it. In Organ Mines, I remove this separation by turning the body itself into the workplace. The flesh, organs, and industrial environment become one system of production.

2-    The artwork suggests that under fast-paced capitalist production, all "effort, blood, tears, and sweat" are erased, turning the subject into a disposable tool. How does translating this mechanical exploitation into a 3D digital aesthetic highlight the alienation of physical labor in a hyper-digitized society?

3D allows me to reconstruct the body in impossible ways. By combining flesh and organs with machinery, the body starts to feel more like a production tool than a person. This can show how workers can be reduced to productivity and financial value.

3-    We are very interested in displaying a making-of or process video alongside the primary digital sculpture of "Organ Mines." How does revealing your underlying workflow (3D modeling, texturing, digital sculpting) enhance the viewer's understanding of how virtual bodies are systematically constructed?

The process video reveals how the virtual body is modelled, textured, and designed. This supports the concept because the body itself becomes something deliberately built and manipulated.

1-    In "Consumer," you mapped real-life photographs of street trash, moldy walls, and cracked roads onto a 3D character driven by motion-tracked facial movements of eating. How does bringing physical urban decay directly into 3D textures serve as a critique of overconsumption?

The textures come directly from the consequences of overconsumption, such as street trash. Modern City life in London was also involved as textural elements of mould and damaged surfaces. By placing these onto the character’s skin, the consumer literally carries the waste of the system on their body, and it becomes the reflection of consumer culture.

2-    By motion-tracking a real person performing repetitive acts (like eating) and projecting it onto an avatar, you mirror consumer habits. Do you consider motion tracking to be a form of digital surveillance or a tool for bodily transformation?

For me, it can be both. Motion tracking captures the behaviour of a real body and turns it into data that can be transferred onto another form. The original person disappears, but their movement continues through the digital character.

1-    Within the context of "The Self as Interface," your selected artwork "Organ Mines" presents the body as a reconfigured machine stripped of subjective value. How does this industrial fragmentation reframe the human body itself as a biological interface designed for economic yield?
The body becomes part of the machinery rather than existing separately from it. Flesh, organs, and labour are merged into one production system.This turns the body into an interface through which capitalism extracts effort and value.

2-    When presenting "Organ Mines" inside Galeria 5ª ao Sul's virtual 3D exhibition space, how do you expect the online audience—who are themselves using screens and performing digital labor—to confront this virtual reflection of labor and body extraction?

There is an interesting contradiction in viewing a critique of labour and digitalisation through another screen. I hope the audience reflects on how much of their own time, attention, and body is connected to digital work.