Suzette Dushi: Presences Unseen

Suzette Dushi: Presences Unseen by Gina CostaDecember 27, 2025

©Suzette Dushi, Recurring Dreams

I met Suzette Dushi this summer through a class we were both involved in, and I was immediately drawn to Dushi ‘s deeply thoughtful, meditative, and beautiful double-exposure photographs, as well as her discussions of this body of work.

Through the course of the class, many fellow students and I were moved by Dushi’s works, which explore a recurring dream. Her evocative, semi-abstracted images suggest the liminal spaces between memory and dreams, a territory known to many of us. Perhaps it is this quality of shared experience with our own uncertain and fluid memories that
makes Dushi ’s images so resonant with viewers.

Suzette Dushi was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1957. She graduated from New York University with a degree in Marketing and worked as a financial analyst in banking. She studied photography at the International Center of Photography.

Her work has been accepted into various group exhibitions in the US and Europe, including the Istanbul Biennial, the Islip Art Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography and the 13th and 17th Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers. She has participated in the Exhibition Lab 2023 at the Foley Gallery. She was selected to Photo Review’s 2025 winners’ gallery, and was a finalist at the HeadOn Photo Awards in 2021. Her photographs have been published in various publications, including Tint Magazine, Hand Magazine, and ArtAscent Magazine. She was awarded Gold Artist for her work “Winter” by ArtAscent Magazine. Her work is in private collections in the US and abroad.

Suzette Dushi lives and works in New York and Long Island.

Instagram: @suzettedushi

An interview with the artist follows.

©Suzette Dushi, Nostalgia

Presences Unseen

These images are part of an ongoing project that explores the meaning of a recurring dream I have. In this dream, I walk through a dense garden into a house. I walk through the rooms, which feel both familiar and strange at the same time, and enter through a door into another room full of shuttered windows. I open the shutters and see that the house is surrounded by the stillness of the sea. This is a garden and house I don’t recall ever being in, but it’s always the same garden, the same house, the same rooms, the same windows, and the sea. This is a dream I know intimately. The images are fragmented and layered and suspended, and then they dissolve and I wake up.

Through my multi-exposure photographs I am trying to peel off the layers of this dream to explore the intricate relationship between memory and dreams. The multi-exposure technique creates ambiguity with the layered images and mirrors the fragmented nature of memory and the surreal quality of the subconscious mind. By overlapping two, three, and sometimes four images, I want to create a sense of uncertainty and a space between presence and absence, between dream and reality. I am trying to make sense of this dream, yet the whole story never quite emerges. Are these suppressed distant memories, or a creation of the subconscious mind? What do our dreams tell us?

These photographs should have different meanings for different people. There is no fixed narrative, but rather a feeling, a presence that is subject to the distortions of memory. Each photograph becomes a map to discover one’s dream’s essence, familiar, yet foreign. For the viewer it could be an abstract vision, an ever-changing feeling. At times the overlap and blending of images create a textured tapestry that feels intricate and expansive, and invite the viewer to recognize the familiar within the barely there. The images read as the in-between spaces for each individual. They can evoke feelings and provoke thoughts about the viewer’s own memories and dreams, blending memory, imagination and emotion to create a new story, a new dreamscape that feels both personal and universal.