Ilayda Celep's 'Anatomy of a Drowning' Critiques Image Extraction

Ilayda Celep, also known as Paranormalitty, presents her series 'Anatomy of a Drowning' as a critical essay on extraction in contemporary image production. Born in İzmir and based in Barcelona, her background in interior design and ephemeral architecture informs her immersive, AI-generated environments. Celep inserts her own face and body into the work not for narcissistic self-representation but to expose herself within the apparatus, treating the body as raw material processed by a non-neutral visual machinery. The mermaid iconography is deliberately subverted: the creature is trapped in water, which becomes a hostile infrastructure rather than a harmonious habitat. Celep's figures are unstable structures where flesh, skeleton, metal, and water converge, refusing to be fully human, mechanical, or mythological. The work is contextualized within a genealogy that includes Kiki Smith's 'Litter' (1999) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as both artists view the hybrid body as a site of vulnerability and mutation. A cinematic parallel is drawn with Guillermo del Toro's 'The Shape of Water', though Celep's aquatic landscape offers no solace, only evidence of exploitative logics sustaining contemporary image production. The series is featured in creAtIva AI Art Book Vol/9 'ART: it is argument', alongside augmented reality and voice narrative.