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
Istanbul-based artists İrem Nalça and Melih Kıraç were selected to participate in the creative exchange program organized in collaboration between The Centre for the Less Good Idea and SAHA. Taking place in Johannesburg between 6–31 July 2026, the program combined structured workshops with periods of independent research, allowing the artists to engage with The Centre’s collective, collaborative, and interdisciplinary approach to artistic production.
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.
