Global Talent Immigration Performance is a three-year durational work grounded in Aksu’s lived experience of the UK Global Talent visa. The project begins when the visa comes into effect on 12 November 2025 and concludes when it expires on 12 November 2028, using this timeframe as both a structural and conceptual framework.
Positioning the visa as both stage and material, the work examines the bureaucratic, linguistic, and affective labour required to live and work under a system that defines who may be recognised as “global” and what constitutes “talent.” Through ongoing documentation of official correspondence, application materials, and everyday encounters, the project reveals how artistic identity is constructed and validated within administrative frameworks.
The performance unfolds online, where access is ticketed and participation becomes part of the work itself. The presence of a sustained audience, and the income generated, are integrated into the project’s structure, reflecting the economic and institutional conditions that shape artistic labour.
As part of the programme at Auto Italia, Aksu presented this ongoing work as a free lecture performance, combining a live reading of project materials with a discussion shaped by participants’ own experiences of immigration, bureaucracy, and artistic practice.
The lecture performance was presented in person at Auto Italia as a free event. It was also live-streamed as part of the ongoing online work, where online access was ticketed via Aksu’s website (tickets available here). Income generated through this element forms part of the project’s structure, supporting the artist’s labour and reflecting the economic conditions that shape the work over its three-year duration.
Betül Aksu is an artist based in London. Her practice spans installation, performance, text, video, and printmaking, and explores how language, systems, and contemporary social structures shape everyday experiences of movement, identity, and belonging.
Her work examines how boundaries appear in daily life, focusing on the role of language within bureaucratic and geopolitical frameworks. Approaching language as both a mechanism of control and a site of resistance, she engages with immigration policies, official documents, and institutional forms to reveal how access and participation are structured and limited.
Betül weaves together personal experience, archival material, and constructed narratives to investigate how identity is shaped through systems that govern mobility and recognition. Central to her practice is an ongoing inquiry into how bureaucratic processes influence perceptions of freedom, belonging, and selfhood, and how these structures might be reinterpreted or unsettled.
Her work has been presented internationally, including at Sharjah Biennial 16; the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje; AVTO, Istanbul; Material, Zurich; and sezon, Izmir. She has undertaken residencies at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and SAHA Studio, and participated in the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice and the Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Programme.