Natis is a conceptual artist, writer, and archivist based in Berlin. His work explores and confronts his own psychic structures in relation to the genealogy of the Artist subject(ivity) within Western ideals, as signified by the intentional capitalization of the term. Through parallel and distinct practices, Natis narrates, lives, and thinks through multiple performative creative personae — Hasan Aksaygın (his birth- and legal name), Hank Yan Agassi, and Hasso Weiss Ehrenwerth — each uniquely suited to his confrontation of the Artist as a social apparatus, shaped by the intricate interplay of libidinal and political economies.

Natis's introduction to painting began in the abandoned churches of so-called Oriental North Cyprus, a place distinctly separated from so-called Occidental Southern Cyprus and influenced by Turkish and Greek right-wing nationalist extremisms. Belonging to any ethnic community in Cyprus has always meant having a hostile Other to shape an identity against. Constantly reminded by these post-British nationalist formations, Natis inevitably internalised the narrative of having no birthright to the images found in those sacred buildings as a young person aspiring to become an image-maker. The psychic battle between the myths about his body and his painting hands is the essence of what he continues to grapple with today. His theoretical and artistic universe is built upon this core story.

___________________________________________________

Natis has come to believe that monadic personality traits — the tendency, under the pressures of late-capitalism, to cling to a singular sense of self (as a brand) — create a series of socially induced psychological challenges in contemporary society, particularly affecting creative individuals. Similar to the materialisation of gender, he asserts that there is no essential core to any creative individual; rather, each of us is composed of socially constructed psychic and social multiplicities. We are nothing without others, interconnected within both our external and internal landscapes.

Originating from "outside" his own linguistic borders, his chosen name, Natis, means no one, combining a Persian prefix with an ancient Greek pronoun. By embodying no one — by doing, or desiring to be nobody in his daily life — and inviting others to call him by this name, he brings his art-making into a more tangible, lived form. 

As Natis seeks to challenge the conventional understanding of the Artist as an invented subject, a site, and a technology where the historical meanings — the epistemologies — of race and gender are sedimented and perpetually projected onto bodies, he comes to terms with the fact that, no matter what he does, he will never truly be an Artist. In this context, Natis feels that he will always need an adjective to define him, and through that definition, he will be conditioned to become a particular kind of artist, one that fits within the economic frameworks of the dominant institutions of Art. Regardless of the mastery he attains over style or technique, he will remain an imposter — a counterfeit version of that modern (human) subjectivity known as the Artist. Always a pastiche.

Accepting the reality that he is neither fully a Human nor an Artist, he asks: Why not abandon these categories altogether and reclaim this state of pastichity with a playful touch of parody — while still taking it all seriously?

Thus, both racialisation and sexualisation have become advantages in his practice through the development of his multiple artistic personae, which enabled him to further investigate the central inquiry of his practice: the riddle of the Artist. Who is the Artist? How did this figure come about? Who should or can be an Artist? Natis aims to construct a critical argument on the evolution of this racial masculinist modern subject.

With Hasan (pronouns: he/his), his doppelgänger, Natis explores personal and collective pasts, history, and (post-)memory from an outsider perspective within dominant knowledge systems, examining the Cyprus dispute and the myths surrounding gendered and racialized bodies in various contexts from his unique position as both insider and outsider. The mutation of himself, Hank (pronouns: it/its), occasionally visits Earth from a spacetime uncertainty. With its shapeshifting physique, Hank's practice focuses on earthly materialities, viewing (non-)humans in a Postordial Soup (the antonym of Primordial Soup) of planetary existence. Through Hasso (pronouns: he/his), a British-German painter, he merges surrealism with neo-expressionism to psychosomatically release restrictions embedded in his body. Together, these personae activate a productive tension for him between the collective and the personal; past, present, and future; remembering and forgetting, through visual and textual speculations.