TR EN
2021-2023

The Alternative Art School

Online

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As part of the collaboration with The Alternative Art School, SAHA supports the online participation of participants from Turkey in the program for the duration of one term each. With the goal of "Artists from around the world teaching artists from around the world," The Alternative Art School (TAAS) offers an interdisciplinary program that includes drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, and curatorial work. The selection committee, consisting of conceptual artist Vahap Avşar, SAHA director and curator Çelenk Bafra, and Alternative Art School founder, American curator and writer Nato Thompson, invited Ege Okal and Ozan Atalan to participate in the program on April 30 -June 18, 2021 and October 22-December 17, 2021 from among 36 applicants to the open call announced in March 2021. In February-May 2022, artists Didem Erbaş and Eda Sütunç and curator Esra Özkan were selected among the 33 applicants. Ece Eldek and Çınar Eslek from Turkey were selected for TAAS's Autumn Term, September 12 - November 18, 2022. Farah Aksoy, Merve Mepa and Deniz Toka participate in the Spring semester from March 10 - May 26, 2023. Oğul Arda Biçer and Fahri Barış Şaşmazoğlu attend in the Fall Semester between 8 September - 10 November 2023.

Merve Mepa

Merve Mepa is an Istanbul-based artist who studies the transformability of language and questioning the tools within the meaning of material. She has been researching whether there are different ways to reproduce, write, or express traditional production practices with today's tools as a document which contains concrete information and carry the practices of intergenerational oral history. She received her Bachelor of Science in mathematics and Bachelor of Art in painting at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. After receiving her Master of Arts from Marmara University, she continues her Proficiency in Art Education at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University since 2021.

Farah Aksoy

Farah Aksoy is a curator based in Istanbul, Turkey. Her research and writing interests include modernism and comparative avant-gardes, postcolonial and globalization studies, and cultural politics within WANA.

Deniz Toka

Deniz Toka centers her daily life around creating communities that are nourished by improvisational movement, juggling and music production. With her belief in the healing power of art, she works with the motivation to encourage people to make art. With the help of everyday objects, she likes to create semi-structured and open-ended experiential games that intend to transform the audience into participants. In her art practice, she seeks and finds the joy and comfort in using her own voice and playing with instruments or objects that make noise/noise/chime, evoking meditation. Her intention is to embrace the moment, individually and collectively. She lives and works in Çanakkale. 

Cnar Eslek

Çınar Eslek's works are about the possibilities of the body, as a complex existence, to experience (and to be experienced), to think ( and be thought), to position itself (and be positioned). The artist, mainly through autobiographical references, ponders on the forces of the body to exist and to be exposed to action while the traces of bodily movement as a dependent component of space. She focuses on the issue of representation -with all the metaphorical meaning it includes- of the whole range of bodies, the transformation of beings, their borders, and our ways of understanding them. While searching for strong attitudes of those non-unique and hybrid bodies who reject being controlled, who use art as an opportunity, who cannot stay put, who are not afraid of themselves, she discovers how they affect each other and how they tend to split.

Ece Eldek

Ece Eldek lives and works in İstanbul. She is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, graphic designer and poet. She has been working in her own studio and continues her artistic production.

Didem Erbaş

Didem Erbaş holds a BA in Painting from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and an MA in Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design at the Sabancı University. She creates site-specific installations/interventions, paintings, drawings, and videos, with a focus on geography, right to accommodation, human intervention to nature, traces on spaces, and transformation. She was one of the first participants to the “Useful Art” studio under the direction of Tania Bruguera in 2013. After having worked as an assistant for Major Works of Modern Art course at the Sabancı University for two years, she now continue her pHD study in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.

Esra Özkan

Esra Özkan’s curatorial practice focuses on the raw material to highlight cognitive experiences created by interdisciplinary artists using emerging new technologies. She frequently collaborates with interdisciplinary artists/technologists who deal with the political and social problems caused by emerging technologies. Esra Ozkan’s curatorial and academic writings bring philosophy together with the post-digital terminology and the effects of Post-human concepts in interdisciplinary arts.

Eda Sütunç

Eda Sütunç received her BA from Koç University and earned her MFA receiving Dean's scholarship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sütunç works at the intersections of performance, sculpture, video, and sound. Her practice draws on feminist and queer theories to explore how gender and sexuality are built within rigid systematic frameworks. Through her works, she seeks to develop speculative narratives in recontextualizing and understanding today's social and political struggles that challenge fixed binaries. Her work has been part of exhibitions in Germany, Korea, Netherlands, UK, Serbia, Turkey, and the United States and has found a place in different collections. She currently resides in Istanbul, holds teaching positions at various universities and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication.

Ozan Atalan

Ozan Atalan, after his graduation from Anadolu University Faculty of Law in 2007, studied Sculpture at Dokuz Eylul University`s Faculty of Fine Arts. Following his graduation in 2013, he attended Syracuse University School of Art as a Fulbright scholar. During his MFA studies, he extended his art practice through an interdisciplinary field and participated in a variety of national and international shows. He also worked as an adjunct teacher at Syracuse University. After getting his MFA degree in 2016, he moved back to Turkey. Since then, he has been continuing his art practice in Istanbul, Izmir and with international residencies and exhibitions. Currently he is working as an adjunct teacher at Izmir University of Economics, Visual Communication Department. He is also doing a PhD in Arts at Yasar University's School of Art and Design. Ozan Atalan's practice is dominated by an anti-anthropocentric approach through an exploration of human nature based specifically on alienation. With a combination of human and non-human values, introversion and extraversion, he mostly makes multimedia installations to create alternative experiences that are realistic enough not to disconnect from reality, but far enough from reality in order to be able to criticize it.

Ege Okal

Ege Okal is working and living in New York. Her work assesses, reimagines, and reconfigures the material and experiential qualities of violence, space, gender, language, diplomacy, and memory through film, animation, installation, and sculpture. She is exploring potential ways of revealing and conjuring multiple meanings in a single work and investigating different degrees of precarity and the tension between fear and humor. Both her artistic and curatorial practices involve collaborative thinking, participation, and storytelling.

She received her MFA in 2020 from Cornell University. Her recent exhibitions include Home Alone, Pera Museum in Istanbul, TR; How to Build an Ocean, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; Tourist, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Or High Water, Safe Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her collaborative film was screened in Istanbul Film Festival, DOK Leipzig, Anifilm, Melbourne International Animation Festival, Helsinki Film Festival, Stockholm Experimental & Animation Film Festival and more.

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