The Center for the Less Good Idea

South Africa

In 2026, The Centre for the Less Good Idea and SAHA launched a collaboration offering artists living and working in Türkiye the opportunity to participate in a one-month international exchange programme in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The exchange programme is designed to introduce participants to The Centre’s distinctive methodology of collective, collaborative, and interdisciplinary making, while providing a space to explore how this experience can inform and enrich their own artistic practices.

THE CENTRE FOR THE LESS GOOD IDEA x SAHA CREATIVE EXCHANGE

We are thrilled to announce the selection of Istanbul-based artists İrem Nalça and Melih Kıraç, who will be travelling to Johannesburg, South Africa, in July for their creative exchange at The Centre.

From 6 to 31 July, The Centre for the Less Good Idea partners with SAHA for a creative exchange taking place, combining structured workshop periods with independent research time. 

While in Johannesburg, Nalça and Kıraç will work with an interdisciplinary group of performers, musicians, and artists, engaging in a collaborative process that moves between research, experimentation, and collective composition. This exchange period also falls within The Centre’s ideation workshops for COLLATION 5, the latest in a series of short, focused programmes of performance-based events around a central theme, method or point of interest.

These generative workshops will allow the two artists participating in the exchange to experience The Centre’s collective way of working in relation to their own practices.

İrem Nalça is an Istanbul-based artist with a background in sculpture. Nalça works with various techniques, including animation, shadow play, and spatial interactions. Consistent in her practice is a search for forms of making in which meaning emerges through encounter rather than declaration. She is interested in how artistic practice can remain open, responsive, and collective.

Melih Kıraç is an Istanbul-based artist, choreographer and researcher. His choreographic research centres around collaborative processes and modes of knowing and experiencing the world, through archive, and the absence of places and bodies with improvisational structures.