We tend to think of oppression as something that comes from the outside. A law, an institution, a government, an authority, or a physical barrier. Visible forms of oppression are easier to recognize. We usually know who enforces them, where they begin, and how to position ourselves in relation to them.
What has interested me for a long time, however, are the less visible forms of oppression. Some systems gradually stop functioning as external rules and become part of the way people think. When an idea is repeated long enough, it no longer appears as a suggestion. It begins to look like reality itself. At that point, the system no longer needs to defend itself. People start carrying it within them.
This is one of the reasons why the concept of internalized oppression interests me. To me, it is not only a political issue. It is also psychological, cultural, and even aesthetic. Many of the things that shape our lives—how we should look, how we should behave, what we should desire, or how we should define success—appear to us as personal choices. Yet the question of how many of these choices truly belong to us often remains unanswered.
One of the most effective mechanisms of modern society may be its ability to make coercion invisible. This is one of the ideas that interested me in Michel Foucault’s writings on disciplinary societies. Power does not always operate through force. Sometimes it works by encouraging people to monitor themselves. Rules are no longer imposed from the outside; they are reproduced internally. The individual is not simply governed by the system but becomes an active participant in its continuation.
The airplanes, technical drawings, architectural plans, and measurements that appear in this painting are therefore more than objects to me. They represent forms of organization—the desire to divide the world into measurable, calculable, and manageable parts. Modernity is deeply invested in classification. We draw maps, establish borders, create categories, and then begin to believe that these categories are natural.
Yet every act of classification is also an act of exclusion. The moment we define something, we place something else outside that definition. The moment we establish a norm, everything beyond it becomes a potential deviation. Perhaps this is why I have always been somewhat suspicious of the idea of normality. What we call normal is often not what is natural, but simply what has been repeated long enough.
The figure at the center of the painting is actually quite large. At first glance, it might be expected to convey a sense of power. What interests me, however, is precisely this contradiction. Sometimes the moments when we feel most powerful are also the moments when we question the systems around us the least. Even when we believe we are in control, making our own decisions and shaping our own lives, we may begin to forget where the frameworks that make those decisions possible actually come from.
Looking back, I read this figure through humanity’s relationship with the systems it has created. As technological, economic, and bureaucratic structures become increasingly complex, individuals often imagine themselves at the center of them. Yet being at the center is not the same as being in control. Perhaps this is where the contradiction begins. We believe we have more choices than at any other point in history. We see ourselves as freer and more empowered than ever before. Yet we continue to be shaped by similar desires, guided by similar measures of success, and influenced by many of the same systems. At the same time, understanding how those systems operate seems to become increasingly difficult.
For this reason, I do not look for oppression only outside myself. Throughout history, many systems have relied on forcing people to obey rules. But once a norm is repeated long enough, it ceases to appear as something that should be questioned and begins to resemble common sense. At that point, oppression becomes invisible. People no longer feel subjected to it because they believe they have chosen it themselves. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of internalized oppression is not its ability to impose something on people, but its ability to make what has been imposed feel like their own idea.