Art, migration, and belonging have become deeply connected in my practice, shaped by my own journey across countries and by experiences I share with many other migrant artists.

Accepted, But Not Yet Welcomed | Art, Migration and Belonging is a reflection on what it means to become visible again, to be accepted, and eventually to belong as a migrant artist; drawn from my own journey and the experiences I share with many other artists living and working across borders.

When I first moved from Türkiye to Australia, I thought the hardest part would be building a new life in a new country. Years later, after moving again from Australia to the United States, I realized that something else was equally difficult: carrying a professional identity across borders.

I had brought my entire artistic life with me. My education, exhibitions, years of teaching, researching, curating, and making had all traveled with me. So had the questions that had shaped my practice for decades.

Yet each time I crossed a border, I found myself facing a question I had never expected to ask:

How much of an artist travels with the artist?

As a professional visual artist, designer, academic, and gallery founder, I arrived with credentials that appeared substantial on paper. From the outside, I seemed prepared. But migration revealed something I had not fully understood before:

Experience travels. Recognition does not.

This is not a story about exclusion, nor is it a story about competition. It is a reflection on what happens when a professional identity built over decades enters a new cultural landscape and becomes largely unknown.

The more I spoke with other artists, academics, and creative professionals who had moved across borders, the more I understood that this experience was not mine alone. Many of us arrive carrying entire careers. What we leave behind is not our knowledge, skill, or experience. What we leave behind is the context that once made those things immediately visible.

Experience Travels, Recognition Does Not

Migration is often described as a fresh start. There is some truth in that idea, but it can also be misleading.

Most migrant artists are not starting from scratch. They arrive with years of technical knowledge, creative practice, professional relationships, achievements, failures, discoveries, and lived experience. What changes is not who they are. What changes is the framework through which they are seen.

I experienced this firsthand.

In Australia, I spent years building professional relationships, exhibiting my work, contributing to local arts communities, and eventually founding and operating an artist-run gallery. By the time I felt deeply connected to that ecosystem, another international move was already underway.

When I arrived in Arizona, I was surprised by how familiar the process felt. Not because I knew the place, but because I recognized the feeling. Once again, I was entering rooms where people had no way of knowing the years of work that had come before that moment.

In the years following my move, I found myself doing something familiar yet strangely new. I was attending openings again, introducing myself again, applying for opportunities again, and having conversations that often began with explaining who I was and where my work had come from.

It was not the work itself that felt unfamiliar.

It was the experience of becoming visible all over again.

These efforts have led to meaningful relationships and opportunities. They have also raised questions that extend beyond my personal story. Why do professional identities so often remain geographically bound? Why does cultural capital travel less easily than people do? And why do so many accomplished migrant artists feel compelled to continually reintroduce themselves, regardless of how much they have already achieved elsewhere?

Diverse Expressions, Shared Emotions; ACCEPTANCE 

Accepted Is Not the Same as Belonging

One of the most important lessons migration has taught me is that acceptance and belonging are not the same.

An artist can be accepted into an exhibition, a residency, or a professional organization and still feel like a visitor. Belonging develops more slowly. It grows through trust, familiarity, shared experiences, and time.

This is not unique to the arts. Yet artistic communities make this distinction especially visible because so much of creative life is built through relationships. Over time, I began to understand that many of the challenges migrant artists encounter are not necessarily the result of closed doors. More often, they come from entering rooms where conversations, collaborations, and networks have already been evolving for years.

The longer I stayed, the more I realized that none of these things happen quickly. Trust develops gradually. Communities reveal themselves over time. Recognition rarely arrives all at once.

This realization shifted my perspective. Rather than asking why I was not immediately recognized, I began asking a different question:

How might we create cultural environments where newcomers are not only accepted, but genuinely welcomed?

The distinction matters.

Acceptance acknowledges presence. Belonging acknowledges participation. Welcome acknowledges possibility.

Cultural Translation and the Value of the In-Between

Migration requires more than adaptation. It requires translation.

The migrant artist is not simply building new relationships. They are translating a career, a body of work, a history, and a set of references into a new cultural context. What is immediately understood in one country may require explanation in another. What carries authority in one place may be unfamiliar elsewhere.

The challenge is rarely a lack of experience. The challenge is making experience legible.

Over time, I began to realize that this process was not unique to migration. Similar patterns exist throughout the arts themselves. Artists often share the desire to understand, question, and represent the world, yet we frequently work within systems that separate disciplines, communities, and audiences into distinct categories.

As a visual artist, I have moved between painting, installation, performance, community engagement, writing, and curatorial work. These practices have never felt like isolated territories to me. Increasingly, they feel like different languages trying to describe similar human experiences.

This understanding has often surfaced in my conversations with filmmaker Chris Agnese, with whom I co-founded Welcome Home Artists Platform. Although we work through different mediums, we often find ourselves looking at the same structures from different angles.

As Chris observed during one of our conversations:

“Painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, cinema, performance, and installation all emerge from a shared desire to understand and represent the world. Yet they often operate as separate territories, shaped by institutions, markets, and systems of value that determine what is visible, prestigious, or worthy of attention.”

For me, this observation extends beyond artistic disciplines. Migration reveals how many of our systems are organized around categories of belonging: national, cultural, linguistic, and professional. What seems natural within a system often becomes visible only when we move between systems.

Chris captures this clearly:

“Perhaps the experience of immigration reveals that these divisions are less natural than they appear. Living between places makes visible the invisible structures that organize belonging.”

This is why the in-between is not only a place of uncertainty. It can also become a place of insight. For migrant artists, the space between cultures, languages, disciplines, and communities is not simply where we happen to stand. It is often where we learn to see.

 

Diverse Expressions, Shared Emotions; BELONGING

When Questions Enter the Studio

Long before I began writing about these questions, they had already entered my studio.

I did not begin the series Diverse Expressions, Shared Emotions with a theory in mind. It began with curiosity. As I moved between countries, I became increasingly fascinated by how certain words seemed to travel across languages while carrying similar emotional weight.

Home. Memory. Love. Belonging. Acceptance. Migrant.

Different sounds. Different alphabets. Different histories. Yet something recognizable remained.

For several years, I have been developing this ongoing body of work by exploring words such as Acceptance, Belonging, Love, Memory, Home, and Migrant across hundreds of languages and writing systems.

At first glance, the series appears to be about language. Looking back, I realize it has always been about something deeper. It explores the tension between difference and similarity, and the fragile yet persistent threads that connect human beings across cultures.

Languages evolve, alphabets shift, and symbols take different forms from one culture to another. Yet many of the emotions beneath them remain strikingly familiar.

A person may say home in one language, belonging in another, and love in a script I cannot read, yet the emotional need beneath the word can still be recognized.

This is what drew me to the series in the first place. I was not interested in language as decoration, or in translation as a purely linguistic act. I was interested in how a word carries memory, culture, longing, and human need. Each word becomes a small map of how people make sense of being alive together.

The works Acceptance, Belonging, and Love were created before this article, yet they now feel inseparable from many of the questions explored here.

What does it mean to be accepted? When does acceptance become belonging? And what allows belonging to evolve into something deeper, a sense of being genuinely welcomed?

The sequence of these works was intentional.

Acceptance comes first. Belonging follows. Love comes later.

Not love as romance, but love as mutual recognition, care, respect, and human connection. In this sense, love is not sentimental. It is relational. It is the moment when presence is no longer merely tolerated or acknowledged, but valued.

Perhaps this progression mirrors the experience of many migrants and immigrant artists. Before we can feel at home, we hope to be accepted. Before we can belong, we hope to be seen. And before a place begins to feel truly welcoming, we hope to feel that our presence matters.

In this way, the series became a visual investigation into the same questions I was living through. It allowed me to think about migration not as an abstract idea, but as a daily negotiation between visibility and invisibility, language and silence, difference and recognition.

Looking back, I realize that my studio was asking these questions long before I found the language to write about them.

The work knew first.

Diverse Expressions, Shared Emotions; LOVE

Building New Homes

Over time, my perspective began to shift. I became less interested in how to enter existing rooms and more interested in what might happen if artists created new spaces for connection themselves.

This idea eventually became one of the foundations of Welcome Home Artists Platform.

The project emerged not from a desire to create another exhibition opportunity, but from a shared curiosity about belonging, identity, memory, community, and human connection in an increasingly mobile world.

Over the years, art, migration, and belonging have become increasingly inseparable in the way I understand both my practice and my place within different creative communities.

The more I reflected on my journey, the more I realized that migration had given me something unexpected: not certainty or easy answers, but a different perspective on both artistic practice and community. It taught me to see multiple systems at once, to recognize connections where others might see separation, and to appreciate the value of moving across disciplines, cultures, and ways of thinking.

Perhaps this is where the conversation ultimately leads: not toward criticism or frustration, but toward imagination.

If migration is becoming one of the defining experiences of our time, creative communities have an opportunity to rethink what belonging might mean.

Throughout this article, I have returned to three ideas that also found their way into my studio: Acceptance, Belonging, and Love.

Looking back, I realize they describe more than a body of work. They describe a journey.

Acceptance is often institutional.

Belonging is communal.

Love, in its broadest human sense, is inherently relational.

Perhaps welcome emerges when all three exist together.

Not when a person is merely admitted into a space, but when their presence is recognized as meaningful.

Not when they are simply included, but when they are invited to contribute.

Not when they are tolerated, but when they are valued.

Artists do not arrive empty-handed. They arrive carrying entire worlds.

The question is not whether those worlds have value.

The question is whether we have learned to recognize that value when it arrives in unfamiliar forms.

And perhaps, in a world increasingly shaped by movement, that recognition is where welcome truly begins.