Among Us: Animal Life in Video Work by Artists from Turkey

Deploying a wide variety of modes of use the electronic recording of sound and moving image, this work invites us to rethink the meanings and effects of life and the life-like in a series of contributions to the vital task of rethinking human and non-human animal coexistence. The work will be viewable daily between October 9 and 28. Lewis Johnson Curator, Gerar Edizel coordinator and Micah Aldaheff gallery curator. The exhibition is sponsored by the Divisions of Expanded Media and Art History.

Kurdish artist Mehmet Ali Boran’s video narratives, photographs, installations, and performance works haunt, with traces of people’s enduring memory, the forgetting imposed by official public narratives of militarist and authoritarian distortions and their erasures of history. Contesting biopolitical regulation of people and territories, his work engages with mechanisms of control and surveillance as exercised in border zones, of cities, districts and countries. He brings a geontological approach to viewing regional flora and fauna together with topographical and geological features, understood also as historical and cultural phenomena. His work has been shown across Europe, at BBK Munich, nGbK Berlin and in Karlsruhe, Germany, Hinterland Gallery, Vienna, Austria, AR Pavilion, Helsinki, Finland, and the Biennale Architettura 2021, Venice, as well in Istanbul, Ankara, Mardin, Mersin, Diyarbakir and at the Çanakkale Biennial in Turkey.

Image: The Quests of an Anatolian Leopard in Disquiet (2022)

https://mehmetaliboran.com/index.html
https://www.canakkalebienali.com/mehmet-ali-boran/?l=en
https://www.gagallery.com/attachment/en/5e275cd8da7bbc4c018b4568/News/5f788f423ac1384228344f1e


Ali M. Demirel, nuclear engineer and architect turned experimental visual artist, lives and works in Berlin. In the 2000s, his work involved real-time computer-generated images with interactive live audio-visual performances. He explored abstract minimal imagery with synchronized sound in collaboration with Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman) before returning to video installation with the trilogy Post-apocalyptic Utopias on Architecture. Fascinated by structures found across nature, Demirel’s videos connect ecology, nature and myth. His work has been presented at institutions internationally, including at the Guggenheim New York, ICA London, the ESSL Collection Vienna, TodaysArt Festival.NL, and Arter Istanbul, and he has performed live around the world at many festivals, including Sonar Barcelona, Mutek Montreal, L’Olympia Paris, Coachella Valley USA, Fuji Rock Japan and Future Music Australia.

The Plant (2018) from Post-apocalyptic Utopias on Architecture series

https://www.ali-m.de/biography/
https://ra.co/dj/alimdemirel/biography
https://www.theartists.net/ali-mahmut-demirel
https://www.arter.org.tr/EN/exhibitions/ali-mahmut-demirel-isle/90


Living and working in Istanbul and Berlin, Ayşe Erkmen takes the social and physical environment that she is in as a starting point and impels viewers to think about space. Inviting viewers to a dialogue with the physical, visual, social, and psychological dimensions of environments, her work typically points to the already existent, reconfiguring objects and relationships in spaces encountered daily, disrupting or getting rid of them, in favour of new models of socializing that open up reality. Her path-breaking exhibiting career stretches from New Trends in Art and Istanbul Biennials (1979; 1989, 1991 & 2013), Skulptur Projekt Münster (1997 & 2017), Manifesta I, and biennials in Shanghai, Berlin, Gwangju, Sharjah, Aichi, representing Turkey at the 54th Biennale di Venezia, along with many other notable shows, including at The Barbican London, Centre Pompidou Paris, and The Contemporary Austin.

Image: Chambal (1999)

http://ayseerkmen.com/works
https://dirimart.com/en/Artists/Ayse_Erkmen/13
https://galeriebarbaraweiss.de/artists/ayse-erkmen/
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/ayse-erkmen/
https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/ayse-erkmen/


İnci Eviner, trained as a painter, often uses drawing as a formal and conceptual point of departure, including for her multimedia works of complex constellations of images and sounds. Working with delegated performers, her video work groups figures in elaborate compositions where they relate in looped choreographies suggestive of tensely erotic, sometimes violent relations, exploring formations and deformations of identity, the workings of power, and the politics of representation, from feminist and post-colonial perspectives. She has exhibited work at major museums and galleries, such as Whitechapel and Hayward Galleries, London and LACMA, at biennials, such as Liverpool and Gwangju in 2018, representing Turkey at the 58th International Biennale di Venezia in 2019. She has work in Deutsche Bank, Centre Pompidou, Istanbul Modern and Guggenheim Collections and is represented by Dirimart, Istanbul.

Nursing Modern Fall (2012)
Beuys Underground (2017)

https://www.incieviner.net/en/cv.html
https://dirimart.com/en/Artists/Inci_Eviner/27
https://www.artnet.com/artists/inci-eviner/
http://www.mehmetakinci.com.tr/istanbul-modern-inci-eviner-retrospektifi.html


Born in the Kurdish province of Mardin, Erkan Özgen is an installation artist working with video, photography and performance, investigating issues involving cultural identity, language, migration and ecology, from ethical and political perspectives. He brings to visibility and amplifies stories lost in the flow of information or intentionally suppressed. His works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Stockholm and Rotterdam, and in international group shows, across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas, including Turquie et Alors (2010) at the Centre Pompidou, dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel (2012), FRONT International, the Cleveland Triennial (2018), Artist and Society at Tate Modern (2018-19), Manifesta Revisited in Amsterdam (2019-20), and the Sharjah Biennial (2023). He is one of the founders of Loading Independent Art Space in Diyarbakir, established in 2017.

Erkan Özgen, The Road to Tate Modern (2003) with Şener Özmen

https://www.zilbermangallery.com/erkan-ozgen-a432.html
https://www.hiap.fi/resident/erkan-ozgen/
https://emmamuseum.fi/en/exhibitions/erkan-ozgen-wonderland/
https://hyperallergic.com/458624/diyarbakirs-art-scene-and-the-voice-of-kurdish-resistance/


Şener Özmen, a Kurdish writer and translator as well as artist, uses irony and humor in provocative works of candid criticism, taking on conditions and situations imposed by authoritarian structures reinforced by recurrent taboos. His disarming and subtly poetic works provoke questioning of the roles of art vis-a-vis the socio-cultural realities of contemporary life, deploying the resources of performance and its representation on camera to provoke the re-imagining of those realities. With solo shows in Germany and Turkey, his work has also been included in group exhibitions in Germany, Italy, France, England, Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, the USA, Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Switzerland, Sweden, Holland, Spain, Yugoslavia, and Austria, including at dOCUMENTA, MAXXI in Rome, nGbK in Berlin and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

The Road to Tate Modern (2003) with Erkan Özgen
Image: How to Tell of Peace to a Living Dove (2015)

https://www.studios-efanyc.org/sener-ozmen/
https://www.pilevneli.com/exhibitions/29-sener-ozmen-a-new-hopelessness-pilevneli-mecidiyekoy/works/
https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/humour-as-a-method-of-struggle-kurdish-artists-in-turkey

Aykan Safoğlu explores cultural belonging, migration, familial lineage, and historical time, as mirrored through personal experience in life and practice. Juxtaposing intimate memory work against media conventions, questioning storage, documentation and reproduction in film, photography, and performance, Safoğlu investigates cultural identities, intellectual labor and genres of kinship, reworking avant-garde practice with attention to queer counter-histories. His recent solo exhibitions include Recess at SALT Galata, Istanbul (TR, 2022), Ebbe/Flut at Coalmine, Winterthur (CH, 2022), and I’ll be your mirror at Kunstverein Göttingen (DE, 2021). His work was also included in Les Rencontres d’Arles (FR, 2021), the 39th EVA International (IR, 2021), VIDEONALE.18 (DE, 2021), and the 11th Berlin Biennial (DE, 2020). He received the Grand Prize at the 59th International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen in 2013.

My Sorrow Nightingale (2014)

https://www.kunstvereingoettingen.de/events/aykan-safoglu/?lang=en

https://11.berlinbiennale.de/participants/aykan-safoglu

https://www.eva.ie/artist/aykan-safoglu/

https://saltonline.org/en/2395/teneffus-aykan-safoglu

https://diversity-arts-culture.berlin/en/art-theft-turkish-migrants-west-berlin

Hale Tenger is acknowledged for her immersive installations bringing diverse materials together in elaborate combinations. She draws her subject matter from cultural, political, and psychosocial references. Her visual and auditory metaphors encourage the viewer to have an intimate experience through the connection of memory, space, and time. Her wide range of production encompasses video, sculpture and photography. Tenger has had solo shows at major institutions and galleries including The Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, Protocinema NYC, Green Art Gallery Dubai, and Galeri Nev Istanbul. She has participated in biennials at Venice, São Paulo, Johannesburg, Gwangju, Havana, and Istanbul. Holder of residencies at NYSCC Alfred, ArtPace and the Rockefeller Foundation, Ballagio Center, her work is in collections such as Centre Pompidou, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Istanbul Modern and Arter.

Circulation 2000
Image: how can we live together 2022

https://www.galerinevistanbul.com/artists/39-hale-tenger/biography/
https://www.gagallery.com/artists/hale-tenger
https://www.designboom.com/art/hale-tenger-balloons-on-the-sea/
https://bienal.iksv.org/en/bienal-artists/hale-tenger