İlker Ortaç is an Istanbul-based writer, illustrator and visual artist.

His work is shaped around the body, identity, disability, alienation, desire, violence, solitude and the pressure of social norms on the individual. Working with a dark, grotesque and at times surreal visual language, Ortaç approaches portraiture not simply as the physical representation of a person, but as a space that reveals human vulnerability, contradictions and unseen sides.

He sees drawing, photography, literature and cinema not as separate disciplines, but as different forms of telling the same story. In his portraits of musicians, directors, writers and countercultural figures, he foregrounds distortion, traces, deformation and character over the promise of a flawless image.

In literature, he has published Second-Hand Virgin (2010), Piss (2016) and The Desire to Lose (2008). He has made short films, acted, and founded DEV-FANZİN in the field of independent publishing.

The body is one of the central axes of his artistic practice. Drawing on his own experience of disability, he approaches disability not as the object of a medical or tragic narrative, but as a political question connected to identity, power, representation and social norms.

LIMIT lies at the centre of this approach. The series examines the encounter between the body and socially determined boundaries of “normality”, as well as the visibility of bodies that fall outside those boundaries. Through disability, gender, identity and difference, it asks who is considered visible, acceptable or excluded.

Underground culture, punk aesthetics, alternative music, independent cinema and literature are strong reference points in Ortaç’s visual world. His aim, however, is not to reproduce the iconography of these cultures, but to transform the sense of dissent and dissonance they carry into a contemporary visual language.

He lives and works in Istanbul.