Living Between Worlds: How Mehves Lelic Uses Photography to Explore the Spaces In Between

by Marissa Friedman
June 30, 2026

For Mehves Lelic, photography is less about choosing between opposites than learning to inhabit the liminal spaces. “As a maker, I feel like one of the greatest privileges is being able to look closely,” she says. As a self described “lens-based” artist, curator, and educator, Lelic’s work explores the spaces between apparent polarities: belonging and displacement, gratitude and grief, interior and exterior worlds, spirituality and technology, illness and healing.

Raised in Istanbul, a city she describes as full of contrasts, Lelic first turned to photography as a teenager. The camera offered a way to make sense of the tensions she encountered around her: between empire and republic, secularism and religion, public life and private experience. “It felt like the camera was able to help me articulate all of the nuances or the gradients between those endpoints,” she says.

That interest in complexity has remained central to her artistic practice. After moving to the United States to attend the University of Chicago, Lelic began exploring how photography could express seemingly conflicting emotions: loneliness and connection, certainty and ambiguity, gratitude for new opportunities alongside grief for the places and communities left behind. She has continued to find photography to be a tool for articulating contradictions rather than fixed truths.

Images courtesy of Mehves Lelic.

Her early work took her across Eastern Europe on assignment for National Geographic, documenting Bektashi communities in Albania and neighboring countries. Over time, however, she found herself moving away from a purely documentary approach. Rather than using the camera to observe the world from the outside, she became increasingly interested in turning inward.

Lelic began asking how photographs might hold multiple truths at once.

That question has shaped projects examining migration, belonging, motherhood, and memory. In a commission for the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, she collaborated with immigrant communities on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, creating layered photographic composites that merged landscapes with intimate domestic spaces. The resulting images explored what it means to build a sense of home while carrying memories of another place.

“Can we simultaneously feel gratitude for belonging and grief for a homeland left behind?” she asks. “Those were very big questions on top of my mind.”

Images courtesy of Mehves Lelic.

More recently, Lelic’s practice has expanded into alternative photographic processes and experimental materials. Following the discovery of a genetic mutation associated with breast cancer risk, she began creating photographic works using chemicals connected to illness, treatment, and healing. For her, the unpredictable ways these materials age and transform mirror the uncertainty of the body itself.

Across these projects, a consistent theme emerges: an interest in duality, not as opposition, but as coexistence. “I’ve been thinking about duality and interiority a lot,” she says. “Whether these things are polar opposites at all, or maybe they’re all part of the same whole.”

At ACT, Lelic is excited to bring these questions into the classroom. After teaching in traditional art departments, she is particularly looking forward to working with students from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds.

Images courtesy of Mehves Lelic.

For Lelic, photography offers a unique meeting ground between technical knowledge, artistic inquiry, and critical thinking. At a moment when image-making has become nearly effortless — and when artificial intelligence, filters, and social media have complicated ideas about photographic truth — she hopes students will move beyond simply taking pictures and begin asking deeper questions about how images shape our understanding of the world.

“It’s almost a reflex now to make an image,” she says. “Going from that reflex into an intentional space can be really fascinating.”

That spirit of experimentation extends to her plans for teaching. Among the projects she hopes to explore with students is building cameras from scratch, a hands-on approach that feels especially suited to MIT’s mens et manus motto and the culture of making.

Whether working with historical photographic processes, contemporary technologies, or materials found in the environment, Lelic sees photography as a tool for slowing down, looking carefully, and embracing complexity. Rather than resolving contradictions, her work invites us to inhabit them.

In the space between opposites, she suggests, we may discover a fuller understanding of ourselves and one another.

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