About

Tijen Erol is a documentary photographer and visual artist whose practice investigates borders, forced migration, and the fragile mechanics of memory. Born and raised in a divided Cyprus, she approaches photography as both testimony and a tool for critical witnessing -tracing how war, displacement, and separation shape individual lives and collective consciousness. Her long-term projects engage with the lived reality of partition, inherited and personal recollections of conflict and the intimate narratives of survival and loss.

In recent works, Erol turns to the politics of visibility by concentrating her works on how people on the move are rendered legible by surveillance yet erased as human subjects. Installations such as HANDLE WITH CARE – Human Inside! Fragile! and The Shadow of the Invisible rework border-imaging aesthetics - thermal, X-ray, and low-resolution traces -to confront the reduction of lives to silhouettes, data, and numbers. Through projects like Cartography of Silence, she also critiques the normalisation of violence in contemporary media culture, inviting viewers to “look closer” and reclaim attention as an act of resistance.

Her work has been exhibited internationally across Europe and beyond. Erol is the recipient of multiple awards and her work is held in collections.