Natis (b. 1986 in Occupied Nicosia) is a conceptual (anti-)painter based in Berlin. He paints through three heteronymic personae: Hasan Aksaygın, a Cypriot historical storyteller working toward multi-communal dialogue; Hank Yan Agassi, a speculative futurist concerned with ecological and planetary afterlives; and Hasso Weiß Ehrenwerth, a German-British neo-expressionist and surrealist.

These three are not mere alter egos but spiritual instruments, prosthetic extensions, and *"synthetic memories"*, through which Natis paints. His aim is not mastery over the image, but a struggle with its resistant, two-dimensional surface. When painting becomes impossible, he writes and constructs objects for his parafictional archives.

Natis has exhibited internationally at institutions such as KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), nGbK (Berlin), NIMAC (Nicosia), DEPO (Istanbul), and the Queer Arts Festival (Vancouver). He was previously a fellow of BPA // Berlin Program for Artists and the Claussen-Simon Foundation, and is currently completing his PhD in Art at HFBK Hamburg.

*A term introduced by Iris Häussler.

Conceptually, his practice confronts personal psychic structures in relation to the globally upheld collective belief in the Artist: a figure invented, regulated, and upheld by Western ideals, signalled by his deliberate capitalisation of the term. For Natis, the Artist is not an individual but a constructed social technology: a fiction through which race, gender, and colonial powers are generated, perpetuated, and projected onto bodies, casting some portion of them and their acts always as pastiche.

Practically, Natis's intellectual agenda takes the unease of the act of painting and centres it as a focal point. His practice is programmed to disturb the theological inheritance of painting, tracing its Abrahamic scopic regimes—from sacred image and the schism between iconodules and iconoclasts to capitalist avatar.

His chosen name, Natis—meaning "no one," from a Persian prefix and Greek pronoun—reflects his refusal of fixed identity and his rejection of the Artist as a late-capitalist disorder: a self-branding, a singular fiction of monadic genius. Instead, he proposes its disappearance through plural authorship and suggests a cure by embracing multiplicity not as pathology but as a way to remain sane as a creative being.

Coming from the militarised, colonially split landscape of Cyprus—particularly from the Turkish-occupied and Greek-besieged territories—he uses the canvas not to unify but to fragment, to give form to absence, contradiction, and the impossibility of home. What is being painted is not the world, but the impossibility of seeing it whole.

In short, through his multiple artist personalities, Natis produces unstable, para-liturgical relics that question both authorship and origin.

Currently, Natis is developing two new parafictional bodies of work under the name Hasan Aksaygın:

An Empirical Miracle: The Red Squared Slug (Triboniophorus Graeffei Quadratus), is a speculative-scientific installation that entangles 19th-century zoology science, imperial networks, European folklore and Cypriot mysticism. The project speculates on a fictional exchange between historical scientists Eduard Graeffe and Henry Baker Tristram—blending archival research, specimen modeling, and narrative fiction to explore the spiritualisation of science and its entanglement with colonial myth-making.

Emmanuelle, is a forensic-poetic investigation into the legacy of murdered Cypriot-British actress Feri Cansel. Through painting, storytelling, and archival imagery, the project reimagines Cansel as a haunting and spectral icon whose legacy becomes a metaphor for Cyprus itself—fractured, fetishised, misremembered, and hyper-gendered, within the nationalist and libidinal economies of the Turkey–Greece–Britain triangle—while critically reflecting on cis-masculine complicities in the act of her depiction.

Natis welcomes collaborations with curators, writers, and institutions interested in para-authorship, archival fictions, speculative historicity, and the afterlives of images. For inquiries, commissions, conversations, or access to full project PDF dossiers, please get in touch via the contact page.