Encapsulate In Transcendence

Works by Bart Was Not Here, Cansu Korkmaz, and Nazanin Noroozi
AFI’s Artist Community Network Group Exhibition

On View: January 10–February 1, 2026
Opening Reception: January 10, 5–8 PM

Transmitter proudly presents Encapsulate In Transcendence, a group exhibition featuring works by Bart Was Not Here, Cansu Korkmaz, and Nazanin Noroozi in partnership with Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI), with curatorial direction from Eva Mayhabal Davis and Lila Nazemian. This exhibition celebrates the Artist Community Network that AFI has cultivated and supported in the last year. The three artists presented here approach their practice with the history and nuance of lived experiences expressed through painting, collage, textures, and personal imagery. There is a bipartite dialogue between intimacy and transition, pain and calm, as works engage with both world-building and destruction. The works presented for Encapsulate In Transcendence condense emotions and actions across all directions, serving as an impetus to strive and maintain momentum, regardless of the condition the mind and body find themselves in. These experiences stem from instability, longing, and in-between conditions dictated by migration and geopolitical circumstances. 

Cansu Korkmaz’s work captures time through photography. In the series Quite a While, Korkmaz assembles wounded photographs. Ripped during a time of exasperation, each photo is repaired but remains fragmented. They depend on each other for meaning and seek identity from an unlikely partner—each image is forced to complement the others, creating contrast and newfound harmony. Images are thoughtfully considered, giving each repaired image a sense of intimacy and playfulness, yet somber, and finally, forgiving.

In the three paintings by Bart Was Not Here, figures emerge with an uncanny presence and stillness. Their elongated, repeated forms evoke subtle changes, while their muted colors convey transparency. The works are from an extended exploration of figures and landscape titled Threshold. As the name suggests, these paintings serve as doorways that open to a new world, an unknown reality, or a threshold shift. Figures and viewers must consider shifts in perception on either side of a barrier, rope, wall, or border, engaging in a constant state of defense or indifference to said barrier. 

The artist Nazanin Noroozi uses repeated motifs to reconstruct unstable histories through delicate, layered archives. The paper medium demonstrates a soft, textured feel, sharp edges, and blended colors that kindle partial memories. The repeating netting is, at times, a veil and at other times entrapment. Similar images, shadows, and tones appear in filmic movement, reanimating both distant and closer thoughts, enacting the longing for transformation, for truth and meaning that are consistently at the periphery, waiting to be encapsulated and transcended. 

The clamor these works evoke from lived experience simultaneously questions identity and belonging. Artistic expression is a means of truth-telling and, on many occasions, the first to guide the consciousness of social movements, offering evidence and testimony that can envision the future. In both instances of shortcomings and utopian futures, when laws have failed, art has been the spiritual engine of social values. 

Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI)

Led by immigration and human rights attorneys, Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) facilitates pro bono immigration representation and resettlement assistance for international artists at risk.

Dedicated to safeguarding the right to artistic freedom, AFI was founded on the notion that artists are uniquely situated to positively and powerfully effect change, provided their voices can be heard. As artists are increasingly censored, imprisoned, restricted from moving freely across borders, tortured, or even killed, it is more critical than ever that we safeguard the right to artistic freedom and zealously champion the courageous artists who exercise it. 

To this end, AFI directly assists artists who have experienced persecution, censorship, or other restrictions on their freedom of expression, and supports artists who have demonstrated a commitment to advancing progressive social change and fundamental human rights.  

We work with immigrant artists to champion art produced in exile, advance creative cultural exchange, improve conditions for artists in their home countries, and safeguard their ability to express themselves creatively through the arts. 

https://artisticfreedominitiative.org/ 

ARTISTS

Kyaw Moe Khine (b. 1996), professionally known as Bart Was Not Here, is a Burmese artist in exile based in New York. Rooted in graffiti culture and raised on imported subcultures, his visual language evolved out of subversion, fiction, and a practiced investment in narratives. Working across large-scale canvases, sculptural installations, figurines, and drawings, Bart constructs sprawling narrative worlds inhabited by recurring characters and shapeshifting motifs.

Bart graduated in Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore in in 2018. He has exhibited internationally in New York, Paris, London, Oslo, Hong Kong, and Yangon. In 2021, following his involvement in the resistance against Myanmar's military coup d'état, he went into exile. He is currently an artist-in-residence under Global Humanities Initiative Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Artist Community Network (Artistic Freedom Initiative). He was also an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2021-2022) and at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York (2023-2024).

Born and raised in Burma under military dictatorship, he grew up alienated by a broken school system, religious orthodoxy, and the inability to assimilate into conservative Burmese culture. Graffiti became his first tool of agency at age 13, adopting the pseudonym Bart Was Not Here to conceal his identity. With limited access to global culture, he found a window through dial-up internet and bootleg markets, absorbing foreign films, literature, and numerous subcultures as maps to other worlds.

Bart's practice walks the line between aesthetic seduction and anti-aesthetic resistance, blending cinematic composition with gallows humor, internet semiotics with folklore, and conventional beauty with mischief.
https://bartwasnothere.com/ 

Cansu Korkmaz is a Turkish-born visual artist based in Brooklyn. Her work explores themes of intimacy, memory, and identity through photography and mixed media. 

Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as The Bridge and Tunnel Gallery (in-between, NY), Mixer Arts (LENS’19: Things Seen), Daire Gallery (Cure as Care), ALAN Istanbul, BAU Gallery, The Lives of Others at the International Photography Festival, UFAT (Signals and Systems), and Les Rencontres D’Arles (On the Frontiers of Freedom). 

Korkmaz has presented solo exhibitions, including Mini Çarşı - Mini Market at The Polygon Shooting Gallery in Turkey and Quite a While at SOHO20 Gallery in New York. She has participated in artist residencies at Arquetopia in Mexico, Artistic Freedom Initiative-ACN, the School of Visual Arts, and Residency Unlimited in New York. During these residencies, she developed her long-term projects KINA and Quite a While, which were later exhibited at Equity Gallery and Gramercy Gallery in New York. She also attended a personal documentary workshop with Arya Hyytiainen at SALT. 

In addition to her visual practice, Korkmaz has published four photobooks: Quite a While, SILENCE, Schadenfreude, and Garip Bir Enerjin Var. Her work has been featured in publications such as Musee Magazine, Art Unlimited, Milliyet, Art Critical, Voice of America, VATAN, The Guide Istanbul, Orta Format, Bantmag, and Elele.

https://www.cansukorkmaz.info/

Nazanin Noroozi is a multidisciplinary artist working with moving images, printmaking, and alternative photography to explore collective history, longing, and displacement. Her work has been exhibited at The Print Center (PA), SPACES (Cleveland, OH), Athopos (Athens, Greece), Golestani Gallery (Düsseldorf, Germany), the Immigrant Artist Biennial (NY), Baxter St at CCNY (NY), the Noyes Museum of Art (NJ), New York Live Arts, and the School of Visual Arts, among others.

She has received fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts (Film & Video), the Marabeth Cohen-Tyler Print/Paper Fellowship at Dieu Donné, Powerhouse Arts, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and MASS MoCA. Her work has been featured in the British Journal of Photography, Die Zeit Magazine, BBC News Persian, Elephant Magazine, and the Financial Times. Noroozi’s works are held in public collections including the New York Public Library, Harvard Art Museums, Arizona State University, and the University of Michigan.

She is Editor-at-Large of Kaarnamaa: A Journal of Art History and Criticism and lives and works in New York City

https://www.nazaninnoroozi.net/