About
Esra Sakir is a visual artist and filmmaker with roots in Turkey and Italy. Her artistic education began at the age of eleven, when she studied in the ateliers of different professional artists each year during weekends. At eighteen, she moved to Italy to study painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where she obtained her Bachelor’s degree in 1996. During this period, her work was primarily rooted in painting, with a strong affinity for magic realism.
In 2006, Sakir returned to Istanbul to teach at Yeditepe University, where she worked as an art teacher in the Visual Communication department. Her teaching focused on re-reading art history through contemporary perspectives, encouraging students to critically engage with historical narratives, visual culture, and representation.
In 2008, she relocated to the Netherlands to pursue a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU). During her master studies, her practice shifted toward research-based artistic production, developing visual and audiovisual responses to theories from the humanities. Her work during this period explored themes such as New Historicism, human rights, women’s empowerment, and intercultural dialogue. She became particularly interested in re-telling and re-contextualising canonical artworks—such as Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas—using digital media, silkscreen printing, and moving image. Alongside this, she produced numerous short films documenting the artistic research processes of fellow artists, establishing audiovisual storytelling as a central component of her practice.
From 2015 onward, Sakir worked extensively as an independent filmmaker and editor in Amsterdam, producing documentaries and artist portraits and building a broad international interview archive with artists and cultural practitioners. Her short films have been recognised at international festivals, including a finalist nomination for the Emmy’s JCS International Young Creatives Award.
Since 2019, Sakir’s practice has increasingly centred on ceramics as a primary medium. Through clay, she investigates cultural heritage, archaeology, ecology, and feminism from a contemporary perspective. Her work connects Mediterranean and Anatolian mythologies with present-day environmental concerns, biodiversity, and the relationship between humans and soil. Wild clay has become a key material in her research, functioning both as a sculptural medium and as a carrier of cultural, ecological, and historical memory.
In March 2023, she was artist-in-residence at AGA Lab in Amsterdam, where she expanded her printing techniques and developed an artist book that was presented in a final exhibition. In the same year, she participated in the IJ Kunst Collective exhibition and contributed to several group shows in the Netherlands.
In 2024, Sakir was artist-in-residence at Waag Futurelab and Voedselpark Amsterdam, where she conducted extensive artistic research using clay sourced from the Lutkemeerpolder. Through participatory workshops and public programmes, she explored the relationship between soil, food systems, urban ecology, and ceramic practice. This research resulted in The Gold of Amsterdam, a short documentary screened at De Vlugt Cinema, as well as Wild Clay Workshops, a participatory film featuring interviews with local residents. Alongside this, she led public courses and workshops at De Bouwput Amsterdam, New Metropolis New-West, the Van Eesteren Museum, and other cultural and community spaces, focusing on collective making, ecological awareness, and cultural storytelling through clay.
Her recent exhibitions include Renewed Narratives (2024), a participatory clay project at Voedselpark Amsterdam, and multiple group exhibitions connected to urban agriculture, social impact, and feminist perspectives on material culture. In 2025, she presented the solo exhibition Mother Earth / Goddess in Clay at the Antonio Cordici Museum in Erice, Italy, where she continues as artist-in-residence in collaboration with the Municipality of Erice. This long-term residency further develops her research into goddess iconography, ancient matriarchal cultures, and the symbolic relationship between land, body, and power.
Sakir lives and works in Amsterdam. Her multidisciplinary practice spans ceramics, installation, film, printmaking, and participatory projects, and is driven by a commitment to re-connecting contemporary audiences with cultural heritage, ecological responsibility, and collective forms of knowledge-making.