MORE CARNAGE FEATURED WORK: BETUL SERTKAYA - SAFEMOD

WHAT DOES SAFETY COST WHEN IT COMES AT THE PRICE OF CONNECTION?

How quietly we surrender to isolation when it’s disguised as comfort. How easily protection becomes the mask of paralysis.

In SafeMod, Betul Sertkaya invites us into a sterilized world of soft danger — a simulated advertisement for a future we are already living. The video unfolds like a lullaby for the disconnected, presenting a sleek, high-tech cocoon pod that promises refuge but delivers erasure. It is a hymn to our collective retreat — the hush that follows when we trade risk for stillness, solidarity for silence.

The irony bites: what glitters here is not salvation but surrender. The work performs the same seduction it critiques — aestheticizing loneliness until it gleams. Sertkaya’s mock ad, with its unnerving calm and clinical perfection, exposes the cruelty hidden in care, the vacuum inside “safety.”

Within the MORE CARNAGE ethos, SafeMod refuses the illusion of control. It ruptures the polished surfaces of technological optimism, peeling back the skin of comfort to reveal the raw pulse beneath. It speaks in static and echoes — fragments of borrowed footage, cinematic ghosts from Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s The Private Life of a Cat — pulled from their original warmth into an alien present. Through these echoes, Sertkaya builds a haunted archive of detachment, where memory itself becomes a recycled image.

This work was chosen because it risks tenderness in the face of apathy. It doesn’t scream; it hums. Its rebellion is quiet but unflinching — a mirror held up to our self-imposed isolation. SafeMod belongs to the carnage not through violence, but through its refusal to pretend that safety saves us.

ABOUT BETUL SERTKAYA

Betul Sertkaya is a visual artist based in Türkiye working across painting, video, sound, and new media. Her practice blurs the line between reality and dream, drawing on cinema and experimental methods to interrogate contemporary isolation and collective experience. Influenced by the post-truth condition and mass-media absurdity, she constructs fictional realities through pastiche and irony. Sertkaya reinterprets fragments of the past to expose the surreal textures of the present, guided by her belief that artistic expression transcends borders and speaks a universal language.

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