This Project Gallery captures the creative output of the Bilkent University Department of Communication and Design. Highlighting undergraduate and graduate senior projects, faculty productions, and interdisciplinary collaborations, the collection ranges from narrative short films and experimental animation to spatial audio and interactive media. Together, these diverse works exemplify how our students and faculty actively work with contemporary media, storytelling, and design practices.
gel zaman git zaman (as time goes by) | Dilsu Atalay | 2025 | Essay Film
Created by Dilsu Atalay as her undergraduate senior project, this essay film is about the first public film screening in Istanbul. A researcher who wants to examine this historical event attempts to piece together fragments from the past. As the boundaries between the researcher’s, the city’s, and the audience’s unconscious begin to dissolve, a deep anxiety concerning historiographical practices and the archive comes to the surface.
Selected for exhibition at BASE Istanbul.
Available to view: https://www.base.ist/eser/gel-zaman-git-zaman-as-time-goes-by/
Apartman Boşluğu (Tenement) | Can Baran | 2023 | Short Film
Directed by our recent graduate Can Baran as his undergraduate senior project. Flung from prosaic routine, a curious janitor creates the opportunity to experience different lives by sneaking into residents’ houses. Upon finding diapositive photographs and audio recordings in the home of an elderly man, his resulting imitation of the tenant leads to an accident that inextricably alters both of their destinies.
Available to stream on MUBI: https://mubi.com/en/tr/films/apartman-boslugu
Sudan Çıkmış Balık (Fish Out of Water) | Nur Özkaya | 2021 | Experimental Animation
Directed by our recent graduate and current alumna Nur Özkaya as her undergraduate senior project. Viewing society as a social organism where order, togetherness, and similarity dominate, this experimental animation explores the internal and external conflict of a misfit individual through a monologue. It depicts the experiences of those who feel lost, unable to adapt to societal expectations, and are perceived as the “other.”
Alongside other attained awards, including the Best Animated Film at the 28th International Adana Golden Boll Film Festival, the project was selected for the 2023 Academy Awards (Oscars) international watchlist for Best Animated Short Film by the US-based Animation Magazine.
BOND | İlayda Altıntaş | 2024 | Mixed-Media Art Book
Created by recent alumna İlayda Altıntaş as her undergraduate senior project, this mixed-media visual journal utilizes collage, photography, and fragmented typography to explore themes of human consciousness and emotional vulnerability. Structured around a conceptual “Cycle of Solitude,” the book charts internal psychological states across distinct phases, visually documenting the friction between personal perception and the external world.
The project was selected from over 400 entries to represent the university at the international ELIA Emerging Artist Showcase and was exhibited at Espace Kiff & Marais in Paris.
MUYBRIDGE-500 | Boran Aksoy | 2018 | Interactive Installation
[VIDEO]
Created by alumnus Boran Aksoy for his MFA thesis project, this interactive installation takes its origins from the Sony PVE-500 Editing Control Unit. By remixing the analog operation of a traditional jog-shuttle with a digital motion controller, the work uses hand and finger gestures to create a new, digitized experience of video playback and timeline navigation.
Reciprocal Reality | Melih Aydınat | 2018 | Video Art Installation
Developed by Melih Aydınat as his MFA thesis project, this installation models a form of communication where the noise ratio deliberately overtakes the signal. By obscuring live-action 360-degree footage beneath layers of glitch art, the piece challenges the conventional use of Head-Mounted Displays to construct an alternative, abstract reality.
Faux Skins // I Can Be You and You Can Be Me | Aziza Abdieva, Pelin Özesen | 2018 | Senior Project (Research as Practice)
This project aims to present the concept of figurative masks from psychology. The main goal is to convince people they are wearing masks in their social environments and to materialize their alternative characters—their façades. The main method used was building a psychological graph for subjects through questioning to understand what sorts of personalities they were hiding. Special masks were then designed for each subject with diverse materials—including foam, chewing gum, pills, and flowers—employing photography to represent the masks and take the message of hidden personalities across.
Cinnah 19 | Can Koçak, Çağlasın Yılmaz, Tolga Daysal | 2017 | Senior Project
The main object of this project is to raise awareness about the architectural characteristics of buildings like Cinnah 19. Inspired by modernist architects such as Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, the work highlights the complex’s utopian amenities—including a rooftop viewing terrace and swimming pool—and explores how rapid, unplanned urbanization left this once-popular 1970s building to its fate.
