HAMASET is a custom-designed typeface that forms a central pillar of my artistic practice, embodying an intentional provocation against institutional neutrality and typographic authority. The word “Hamaset” itself, which translates from Turkish as bombastic rhetoric or exaggerated nationalist speech, deliberately signals a critical stance, confronting the ways typography quietly asserts control, legitimacy, and power. Bold, angular, and occasionally unsettling in its letterforms, HAMASET evokes and disrupts historical and contemporary typographic conventions used by political institutions, governments, and corporations. By inserting this visual friction into texts and sculptural installations, HAMASET becomes both a formal and conceptual tool: it does not merely communicate but actively interrogates the structures through which meaning and ideology circulate. Through HAMASET, my practice insists on exposing how even the subtlest design decisions carry political implications, thus pushing typography from a passive backdrop into an urgent, critical space of contestation and dialogue.
Please view the document below, which outlines a version of the specimen design for the HAMASET typeface. This version can vary in its physical realization.
The bespoke typeface Hamaset was conceived for OPUS: A Para-Opera Structure, designed by Yetkin Bașarır
Hamaset is intended to convey the grandeur of opera.
Hamaset serves as a conceptual gesture, creating an exaggerated expression to captivate spectators.
In contemporary Turkish, politicians have turned "Hamaset" into a verb, often replacing its meaning with populism and demagogy.
As OPUS progresses, the font family of “Hamaset” will expand with bespoke versions that conceptually fit each section.
