First Contact (İlk Temas), 2024. Digital drawing, © İlker OrtaçDrawings and answers: İlker Ortaç, sent to Uchi on 24 October 2026 · 26 October 2026
Artist feature 特集 · İlker Ortaç · Istanbul
LIMIT
An ongoing visual project built around a simple question: who gets to define what a “normal” body is?
一Question 1
Where did LIMIT start? Was there a moment, a body or a drawing that set it going?
I was born in 1973 with cerebral palsy, so for me the question started long before the project did. All my life my body has been looked at as something to be corrected. I worked for years at Turkey’s social security agency, first as a writer and then for 13 years as a programmer, and after early retirement, when my pension wasn’t enough, I washed car windscreens at traffic lights in Istanbul.
Standing among cars all day, I kept thinking about how quickly we decide that something is broken and needs repair. LIMIT began when I turned that around: I built the online exhibition as an auto body paint shop, a place whose whole job is fixing things, and filled it with bodies that refuse to be fixed.
二Question 2
Who gets to define what a “normal” body is? Has your answer changed since you began?
At first I would have said doctors, institutions, the state: the people who measure, classify and write reports about us. I still think that is true, but working on LIMIT I understood that the definition also lives in ordinary looking, in the street, in families, in advertising, even in ourselves.
Broken Gaze (Kırık Bakış), 2025. Digital drawing, © İlker Ortaç
“Normal” is not a fact about a body; it is an agreement about which bodies are useful, desirable and allowed to be seen.
That agreement can be questioned, and drawing is my way of questioning it.
三Question 3
Your figures return the gaze. How do you build that into a drawing?
I start with the eyes and the face, and I refuse to make the figure apologise. The bodies in LIMIT are grotesque, vulnerable, sometimes funny, but they are never posed as victims waiting for sympathy. They take up the frame, they look straight out, and they are drawn larger and closer than is comfortable.
When a viewer meets that look, the question shifts from “what is wrong with this body?” to “why am I looking at it this way?”
Close to the Wall (Duvara Yakın), 2024. Digital drawing, © İlker Ortaç
四Question 4
Where does LIMIT go next: new works, a show, a book?
I am preparing physical exhibitions of the drawings, and I keep adding new works to the series. Two of the works will appear in Wordgathering, a journal of disability literature at Syracuse University, and I am writing texts about drawing with cerebral palsy for publications in Europe.
In the long run I would like LIMIT to travel: as prints on walls, in conversations and in public spaces where people don’t expect to meet bodies like these.
Answers and pictures: İlker Ortaç, sent to Uchi on 24 October 2026 and published as received. LIMIT, the drawings and the text belong to İlker Ortaç. The questions are Uchi’s.