Tate St Ives

United Kingdom

SAHA collaborates with the UK-based Tate St Ives since 2020, with the aim of providing support for the participation of artists from Turkey in the Tate St Ives Artist Residency and Commissions Programme. The productions by the artists working in the atelier spaces at Porthmeor Studios meet with international audiences through solo exhibitions at the Tate St Ives.

Participants with SAHA's support

Ahmet Doğu İpek
2025
SAHA supported the Cornwall-based institution Tate St Ives for the participation of artist Ahmet Doğu İpek in the fourth collaborative iteration of the “Artist Residency and Commissions Programme”. Following Tate St Ives director, Anne Barlow’s studio visits in December 2024 upon SAHA's invitation, Ahmet Doğu İpek received an invitation to the 2025 program. During the months of April and October, İpek made research and developoed a new body of work at Porthmeor Studios, His solo exhibition at Tate St Ives is on view between 18 October 2025 - 8 March 2026. Inspired by the natural landscape of Cornwall and the Anatolian night sky, İpek’s large-scale works on paper evoke Neolithic standing stones and the ores that permeate the geology of the region, as well as the planets Mars, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus and the sensation of a galaxy. The works are named after St Eia, the patron saint of St Ives, and the exhibition title borrows from a 1963 novel by Turkish-Kurdish writer Yaşar Kemal.

Cansu Çakar
2024
Following studio visits in Turkey by Anne Barlow, director of Tate St. Ives, upon SAHA's invitation, Cansu Çakar received an invitation to the 2024 program to research, produce and present her works. The miniaturist- inspired painting installation is the result of two residencies in St Ives, undertaken by Çakar in 2024, during which she became interested in representations of seashells, imagining them as both homes and graves. Laboriously derived from murex sea snails, Tyrian purple was named for its origins in Tyre, a centre of the ancient civilisation of Phoenicia that spread from modern-day Lebanon to trade and settle across the Mediterranean. This rare dye has been used to colour many precious artefacts through time. In parallel, tin from Cornwall and Devon was also a valuable resource across the ancient world. Çakar’s installation re-examines concepts of value, rarity and cultural heritage by speculatively tracing such ancient trade routes, real or imagined. Unfolding across a shell-like spiral of paper resembling an ancient map, it offers a story guided more by oral traditions than historical records.

Burçak Bingöl
2022-2023
Burçak Bingöl conducted her research and production at Porthmeor Studios between March 1 - April 1, 2022, transformed the space into an kiln-like space in the exhibition Minor Vibrations on Earth between October 15, 2022 - January 15, 2023. The artist's work explored notions of belonging, cultural heritage, identity, decoration and failure by blurring the boundaries between these seemingly distinct notions.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan
2022-2023
Another artist invited from Turkey, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan's solo exhibition Earthbound Whisperers was held between May 27 and October 15, 2023. During an artist residency with Tate St Ives in 2022, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan became fascinated with Cornwall’s megalithic stones and the legends related to them. Considering human traces evident within nature, Earthbound Whisperers vocalises histories hidden deep within landscapes and politics of invisibility and erasure. Exhibition explores relationships between bodies and landscapes and how surfaces accumulate traces of histories within. 

About Tate St Ives
Alongside Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool, Tate had formed a close link with St Ives when it took over the management of the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1980. As a result of the large number of visitors at the gallery, it was decided to refurbish and extend Tate St Ives. The making of the new Tate St Ives completed in summer 2017. 
https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-st-ives/