Farhan Khalid

I make paper cutouts, cut by hand with a blade. Some works are cut freehand, the blade finding the image directly; others begin as a single unbroken pencil line, drawn without ever lifting from the page — a discipline I trace to Picasso's one-line drawings and to a long fascination with continuity. Either way, the line cannot be revised: every decision is final, and the finished work records not only an image but the risk of making it. What interests me is the point where control gives way — forms that seem to converge or disperse around something unseen.

I work in Istanbul, a city with a five-century tradition of paper cutting — katʻı, the nearly vanished art of the Ottoman court — and I have come to understand my practice as its continuation: the same patience, the same blade, the same conviction that paper is not a surface for an image but the substance of it. I cut mostly Japanese papers, sometimes handmade Nepalese sheets, and most recently handmade Turkish paper acquired from a studio that no longer produces it — materials from traditions that are themselves disappearing. My work carries all of this into an abstract, contemporary language, asking what remains when everything inessential has been cut away.