Her work draws on both traditional and contemporary materials, incorporating cultural practices such as crocheting, doily-making, and cleaning rituals as performative acts. These gestures function simultaneously as labour, memory, and devotion, blurring the boundaries between care and burden, love and exhaustion. Yarar’s process is rooted in experimentation and repetition, allowing each project to unfold through the relationship between body, material, duration, and audience participation.
Positioning performance as a site of healing, Yarar is interested in how embodied repetition can hold space for intergenerational suffering while honouring invisible and feminized labour. Her installations and performances create intimate environments where personal memory intersects with collective experience, challenging dominant narratives around productivity, visibility, gender, and value. Through slow, sustained actions, her work insists on care as a political, emotional, and ethical practice; one that resists erasure and demands recognition.
Damla Yarar is a Turkish-Canadian interdisciplinary artist whose work explores inherited behaviours, memory, and the embodied experiences of domestic labour through a matrilineal and diasporic lens. Born in Turkey and currently based in Toronto, her practice is deeply informed by personal histories, intergenerational narratives, and the cultural knowledge passed through women’s domestic gestures.
Yarar holds a BFA from the University of Waterloo and is currently pursuing an MFA in the Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design program at OCAD University. Her work has been presented at Xpace Cultural Centre, OCAD University Galleries, Samuel J. Zacks Gallery, and the University of Waterloo Art Gallery. Through performance, installation, and material-based experimentation, Yarar continues to investigate care, labour, and memory as both personal inheritance and collective experience.
