Artist Nilgün Özer writes about debuting her genre-defying piece, Broken Patterns, at MANIFEST:IOO 2025.
Jul 23, 2025
Photography by Ayca Tugran
Before I even stepped on stage at MANIFEST:IO, I felt something unusual: ease. That almost never happens. Usually, when I’m about to perform, especially for a large audience, I feel a wave of anxiety. But this time was different. It was as if the room was already tuned to the frequency of what I was about to share.
I performed Broken Patterns, a multidisciplinary piece that explores the tension between tradition and modernity, routine and rupture, reflecting on how we carry on with our rituals while navigating a world that often feels like it’s coming apart. In my performance, I blend voice, electronics, field recordings, and the ney, a traditional Middle Eastern wind instrument. The tension between these elements mirrors the world I live in—a world that’s beautiful and crumbling, structured yet fraying at the edges.
To give visual shape to these feelings, I worked with media artist Miraal Habib, who brought the paintings I created for this series into motion through projection. She added her own layer of interpretation that made the piece feel even more alive. I also wore a patchwork garment I’d made from childhood fabrics to give form to the fragmented realities the work explores. Broken Patterns is about holding contradictions: electronic and acoustic, east and west, dreams and collapse.
The audience felt like my community, not spectators, but participants in the world I was discovering on stage. That feeling of togetherness, in fact, aligns with the piece, that even in dissonance and rupture, there’s the possibility of connection and transformation.
As someone who works across sound, text, and visual media, I’m constantly looking for spaces where boundaries blur—where ideas don’t need to be explained, just felt. MANIFEST:IO created that kind of space. It held me, and in turn, held the work.
This was the first time I shared Broken Patterns with the world. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to begin.
Broken Patterns was performed by Nilgün Özer together with Ashley Maurice and Miraal Habib at MANIFEST:IO 2025
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With additional support provided by Parallel Processing and Hari Krishna
This article was written by Nilgün Özer and edited by Harshini J. Karunaratne