SAHA Studio opened its doors to public on Thursday, December 19, 2019 between 14.00 – 20.00. Artists Larissa Araz, Alper Aydın, Özgür Demirci and Sibel Horada opened their studios and met with art professionals and visitors for the first time to introduce the projects they have been developing at SAHA Studio since its inauguration in August, whilst sharing further insight on their ongoing artistic practices by presentations and lecture performances. 

Program: December 19, 2019, 2-8pm

3pm Introductory remarks: Çelenk Bafra and artists

3:30pm Artist Presentation: Alper Aydın

4pm Artist Presentation: Larissa Araz

5pm Artist Presentation: Özgür Demirci

6pm Artist Presentation: Sibel Horada

6:30pm Introductory remarks: Çelenk Bafra and artists

Founded by SAHA in 2019 as a program for research, interaction, and creation to support the independent production of visual artists, curators, and writers, SAHA Studio begins its 12^th term between July –  December 2026 with Ateş Alpar (Istanbul), Osman Bozkurt (Istanbul), Şafak Çatalbaş (Istanbul), Etem Şahin (Izmir), and Doğa Yirik (Istanbul). With a focus on research, production, and exchange, SAHA Studio offers resident artists a six-month program that includes a personal workspace, a stipend, and a production budget, while also aiming to enrich their research and production processes.

As a program focused on research, production, and sharing, SAHA Studio’s participants regularly meet with art professionals from SAHA’s national and international collaboration network, Curatorial Program guests, Selection and Advisory Board members, and artists from previous program periods, developing their networks while receiving feedback that contributes to their projects. Throughout the term, artists are also included in various events where they have the opportunity to share their research and production processes with audiences. As with every period, the Midterm Gathering for the 12^th term is planned to take place in October, at the midpoint of the period. At the end of the program, within the scope of SAHA Studio Open in December, the projects developed throughout the period are presented to the public in different formats, together with events and presentations proposed by the artists.

Active in Beyoğlu between 2019 and 2023, SAHA Studio has, with its 12^th period, provided 59 different artists and artist groups with opportunities for producing work, receiving feedback, learning together, and developing events and new connections. İMÇ, where the SAHA Studio program has been restructured across three separate spaces, continues to be a complex with ties to visual art and artists through the modern artworks it houses, the 9^th Istanbul Biennial it hosted in 2007, and the independent art initiatives working in its various shops. İMÇ’s rich production environment, intertwined with craftspeople from various sectors, creative enterprises, and different artistic disciplines, offers SAHA Studio’s guest artists not only a physical space but also an inspiring and multi-layered context. This multifaceted interaction allows artists to develop their projects through interdisciplinary approaches.

Up-to-date information on SAHA Studio’s 12^th term artists’ processes and the program calendar can be accessed through SAHA’s website and social media accounts.

For its 12^th term between July – December 2026 and the 13^th term between January – June 2027, the new preliminary jury is composed of Sibel Horada, Metehan Özcan, Merve Ünsal, Cansu Çakar, İrem Tok, Nadir Sönmez and Suat Öğüt, from the seven different terms of the program, while the Selection and Advisory

SAHA Studio is presenting the new works developed by Eda Gecikmez, Yekateryna Grygorenko, Zeynep Gürler, Elif Öner and Furkan Öztekin, who took part in the 11^th term between January – June 2026, following the open call, to the public between 17–20 June 2026 at its program spaces located in İMÇ.

The five artists joining the program from Istanbul, Düzce, Ankara, and Tekirdağ were visited over the course of six months by 33 art professionals from Turkey and various other countries, including guests of the SAHA Curatorial Program, with whom they shared their practices and ongoing projects and received feedback. Alongside studio visits held throughout the period, the artists also had the opportunity to share the research and pre-production processes of their projects with visitors and receive feedback on their ongoing work through the Midterm Gathering, which took place on March 27 and 28, 2026.

SAHA Studio Open will be open to visitors from 15.00 on Wednesday, June 17. The event will be accompanied by talks, performances, and other events touching on the artists’ production processes, alongside meetings and presentations. For more information, you can follow SAHA’s website and social media accounts.

SAHA Studio Open

17 June, Wednesday
15.00 – 19.00   : General Visits
18.00 – 19.00   : Performative Presentation | Furkan Öztekin

18 June, Thursday
12.00 – 19.00   : General Visits
14.00 – 15.00   : Guided tour with the artists
18.00 – 19.00   : Talk | Zeynep Gürler & Esra Ece Kuleci

19 June, Friday
12.00 – 19.00   : General Visits
14.00 – 15.00   : Guided tour with the artists
18.00 – 19.00   : Talk | Elif Öner & Zehra Begüm Kışla

20 June, Saturday
12.00 – 19.00   : General Visits
16.00 – 17.00   : Talk | Eda Gecikmez & Aslıhan Demirtaş
18.00 – 19.00   : Talk | Yekateryna Grygorenko & Nergis Abıyeva

Eda Gecikmez concludes her six-month at SAHA Studio with two interrelated projects. Up until the Midterm Gathering, she worked on compiling the archive of of Kırmızı Kart (Red Card), a collective that fostered a space of solidarity and action against the inequalities, violence, and discrimination generated by the patriarchal system between 2011 and 2015. In the second half of the program, Gecikmez focuses on diverse forms of resistance that have emerged within the city. Bringing together painting, drawing, ceramics, and found objects in the studio, she invites viewers to reflect on ways of existing within a city at the center of constant change and transformation.

In her project titled How to Belong Here, Yekateryna Grygorenko explores the concepts of identity and belonging, placing her own personal experiences as a Ukrainian artist living in Turkey at the center of her work. The project adopts a humorous language to question the dominance that cultural identity and bureaucratic boundaries impose on the individual. Through flags, matryoshkas, and biometric “photographs” in the studio, it disrupts imposed perceptions of identity and culture, proposing an identity freed from bureaucratic definitions.

Zeynep Gürler continues working on Sediment, the second chapter of her project There, which she began developing in 2023 within the scope of SAHA Studio. Developed around Lake Efteni in Düzce, the project treats the lake as a spatial and sensory carrier of memory, interpreting the relationship between nature, humans, and non-human beings through it. Recurring images gathered during regular walks around Efteni are documented through photography, video, and drawing, and together with weaving works produced from these same walks, come together as an installation that spreads across the studio space.

Having long engaged with the concept of shadow in her practice, Elif Öner approaches shadow both as a mode of expression and a conceptual framework in her project The Play of Shadows. Focusing on the multilayered history of Unkapanı and its surroundings, the project examines the ruptures, discontinuities, and transitions between these layers through motifs. The video work, which also draws on Turkish shadow theater as a narrative tool, is accompanied by figures/tasvir (shadow puppets) produced by bringing together traditional shadow puppet making techniques with motifs from Ottoman gravestones and textile patterns found in İMÇ. 

Relapse is grounded in the archive of Ceyhan Fırat, an activist and artist with whom Furkan Öztekin collaborated between 2019 and 2021. Compiled throughout the residency period from libraries, print, and digital sources, the archive spreads across the space through various mediums including painting, photography, video, and publication. The phrase “ramshackle pink” used by Ceyhan to describe the sky in their autobiographical novel, runs through the studio as an ongoing color study rendered in paper installations. 

SAHA Studio’s 11th Term artists will hold a talk moderated by Esra Ece Kuleci on Saturday, April 25 at 5:00 pm. Continuing their practices at the Studio spaces located in İMÇ since January 2026, Eda Gecikmez, Yekateryna Grygorenko, Zeynep Gürler, Elif Öner, and Furkan Öztekin will share how the Studio process has progressed, how working together and side by side has transformed their practices, and how their research processes have taken shape.

About Esra Ece Kuleci:
Esra Ece Kuleci is a content creator, editor, and project manager focused on understanding, documenting, and sharing creative production processes. She graduated from Istanbul University with a degree in Turkish Language and Literature, and from Anadolu University in Communication and Media Studies. She further developed an interdisciplinary perspective through studies in cultural and arts management at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.
After gaining experience at İKSV, Pikan Agency, Arter, and Onagöre, she founded the platform Üretim Kaydı in 2020, where she conducts in-depth interviews with practitioners from fields such as cinema, literature, music, and photography. She previously worked as an editor at Argonotlar and has contributed interviews to publications including Sanat Dünyamız, Bant Mag., and Sekme Dergi. She currently continues her freelance work, producing content and developing digital visibility strategies for cultural and artistic institutions and projects.

About SAHA Studio 11th Term Artists:
Eda Gecikmez (b. 1984, Istanbul) graduated from the Painting Department at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts and completed her MA at Yıldız Technical University, Institute of Social Sciences. She later received her Proficiency in Art degree from the Painting Department at Hacettepe University. In her practice, she works across painting, drawing, collage, and performance to investigate bodies and spaces that are shaped, fragmented, and reproduced through various agents. Using a visual language informed by feminist and avant-garde traditions, she traces the relationships between the historical, textual, everyday, mythic, and political.

Yekateryna Grygorenko (b. 1996, Mersin) graduated from the Painting Department at Dokuz Eylül University and later completed her MA in Painting at the same institution. As a Ukrainian artist living in Turkey, she reflects in her practice on the processes through which culture is constructed, as well as on language and borders, approaching these concepts through the individual’s living, experiencing body. At the core of her artistic production lies the relationship between body and soul, and the uncanny tensions between the body’s interior and exterior; an axis that converges into a conceptual framework shaped by posthumanism.

Zeynep Gürler (b. 1988, Istanbul) is an artist and an academic living in Düzce. Gürler completed her undergraduate studies in the Painting Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Gazi University, where she later received her MA and Proficiency in Art degrees. Her practice explores the relationships between ecology, memory, and space through a multispecies perspective that considers both human and more-than-human beings. Bringing together photography, video, installation, and drawing-based works with long-term field research, she focuses on making visible the temporal and affective layers of geographies.

Elif Öner (b. 1980, Istanbul) lives and works in Istanbul and Rotterdam. After completing her studies in the Painting Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Marmara University, she began her MA at the same institution. She subsequently participated in the Borusan Art Center Istanbul Artist-in-Residence Program for two years. Shaping her practice around dualities such as reality/virtuality and traditional/contemporary, Öner explores the unconscious through the concepts of history and memory. As one half of the artist duo Sensitive Sounds with Evrim Kavcar, she also collaborates and produces in the fields of theatre and cinema.

Furkan Öztekin (b. 1993, Tekirdağ) is an artist and researcher living and working in Tekirdağ. He completed his undergraduate studies in the Painting Department at Dokuz Eylül University and is currently pursuing his PhD in the Painting Program at Trakya University. His practice expands from personal archives and stories into the social sphere, unfolding across various media including collage, photography, painting, installation, and found objects. Since 2019, in his research centered on the archive of artist and activist Ceyhan Fırat, he explores the concepts of space, border, void, abstraction, and loss through the possibilities of queer art.

SAHA Curatorial Program guest Amanda Carneiro will give a talk at SAHA Studio, on April 24 at 5 pm. The talk will take a closer look at MASP ’s program through the lens of Histories, a long-term curatorial framework that has shaped the museum’s exhibitions, collection displays, publications, and public programs in recent years. Rather than proposing a single, stable narrative, this approach understands history as plural, disputed, and open to revision. Through this framework, MASP has sought to create critical dialogues between past and present, and to bring into view artistic practices and historical experiences that have often been marginalized within canonical art history. The presentation will offer an overview of this curatorial methodology, with particular attention to how the Histories program has enabled a rethinking of the museum as a space for polyphonic narratives, social debate, and epistemic transformation.

About Amanda Carneiro:
Amanda Carneiro has been a curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) since 2018 and was Artistic Organizer of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2024), Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. At MASP, Carneiro has curated and co-curated a wide range of exhibitions and edited catalogs devoted to modern and contemporary art, many of them developed in collaboration with national and international institutions such as The Whitworth, the American Folk Art Museum, Museo del Chopo, Itaú Cultural, and the Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg. Her recent projects include Santiago Yahuarcani: The Beginning of Knowledge (2026), Hulda Guzmán: Miracle Fruits (2025), Serigrafistas Queer: Freedom for Sensibilities (2024), and Video Room: Kang Seung Lee (2024). She holds a BA and an MA in Social History from the University of São Paulo and is currently a PhD candidate in the same field. She was co-editor of Afterall Journal (2020-25), where she now serves on the editorial board.

The launch of the New Home monograph, which focuses on Yeşim Akdeniz’s current body of work, will take place on April 22 at 5 pm at SAHA Studio. Akdeniz will be joined at the launch event by Amira Akbıyıkoğlu and Yekhan Pınarlıgil.

Published on the occasion of her comprehensive exhibition at Galerie der Stadt Backnang, the book brings together a foreword by Martin Schick, a text by Ela Atakan, and a two-part conversation between the artist and Yekhan Pınarlıgil. Spanning the artist’s last five years of production, the publication traces how themes such as migration, identity, and cultural codes are transformed within Yeşim Akdeniz’s artistic language. Designed by Ulaş Uğur, the book also reflects the artist’s approach through its structural features: a special folding cover and a two-part interlocking structure that reference the layered quality of her work. Beyond being a catalogue, New Home is a document that situates Yeşim Akdeniz’s recent practice within a broader conversation on art, history, and belonging; one that opens space for dialogue and reflection.

About Yeşim Akdeniz
Yeşim Akdeniz studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Following her graduation, she was accepted into the De Ateliers program in Amsterdam from 2002 to 2004. She received the Buning Brongers Award in 2004 and the Peter Mertes Stipend in 2005. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunstverein Frankfurt, Sammlung Philara Düsseldorf, Kunstverein Bielefeld, MAK Museum Vienna, Kunsthal Mechelen, Guggenheim Gallery Los Angeles, and Pakt Foundation Amsterdam.
Akdeniz’s practice is shaped by symbolic narratives that reflect cultural production, negotiation, and the formation of identity. Through her distinctive visual language, she addresses the circulation of form, material, and labor, while bringing together personal and cultural references to offer layered readings of history, identity, and collective memory. The artist currently lives and works between Brussels and Düsseldorf.

SAHA Studio is now accepting applications from visual artists for its 12th term, running from July to December 2026!

As a multifaceted research and production program, SAHA Studio aims to enrich the research and production processes of selected artists by providing studio space and a production budget at its İMÇ facilities over a six-month period, along with opportunities for feedback and network building. During the program, artists meet not only with curators, researchers, and art professionals from Turkey but also with visiting guests of the SAHA Curatorial Program from abroad, allowing them to present their practice, receive feedback, and establish new professional connections. Activities such as studio meetings, exhibition and collection visits facilitate shared learning, while the mid-term and SAHA Studio Open gatherings provide a platform for artists to receive feedback on their projects and present new works.

Founded in 2019, SAHA Studio receives support from a preliminary jury composed of artists with previous program experience, which rotates annually over two-term cycles to make the selection process more participatory. Applications highlighted by the preliminary jury, composed of one artist from the program’s previous seven terms, are reviewed by the Selection and Advisory Board, which also provides ongoing feedback to participants throughout the term. After interviews with the shortlisted candidates, five artists are invited to participate in the term, with no specific medium or age criteria, while attention is given to the potential of their proposed research projects to utilize SAHA Studio’s resources, the interactions they will create through individual and collaborative experiences, and to providing opportunities for artists from outside Istanbul.

For the 12^th term between July–December 2026 and 13^th term between January–June 2027, the new preliminary jury and Selection and Advisory Board will contribute to the program:
Preliminary Jury: Sibel Horada, Metehan Özcan, Merve Ünsal, Cansu Çakar, İrem Tok, Nadir Sönmez, Suat Öğüt
Selection and Advisory Board: Nuri Kuzucan, Duygu Demir, Serra Yentürk

Opportunities provided by SAHA Studio:
– Personal workspace and mutual workshop environment at SAHA Studio for 6 months
– Accommodation and transportation for participants invited from out-of-town
– Budget (up to 200.000 TRY) including honorarium and research, production, exhibition, and event expenses 
– Basic equipment and crew assistance for production and installation
– Curatorial, editorial, and legal counseling
– Participation in SAHA’s art and learning programs

Documents to provide at application:
–  Application Form (pdf file available on the bottom of the page)
–  Project proposal (max. 500 words) 
–  Draft budget (including research, production and presentation costs)
–  Resume / curriculum vitae (max. 2 pages)
–  Portfolio (max. 20 pages)*
– Copies of press reviews and/or catalog scans (if applicable)
–  Reference letter(s) (if applicable)

*Portfolio:
>Must include works produced within the last 5 years
>Should comprise a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20 pages
>Each page may present no more than one or two projects
>All works must be accompanied by complete captions (title, medium, dimensions, and date)
>For video, sound, or similar projects, please ensure that all links provided are active and publicly accessible

Please merge all documents in a single PDF of max 7 MB in the order above and send to sahastudio@saha.org.tr with the subject “SAHA Studio 12 – Application”

DEADLINE: 11 April 2026, 6 pm (GMT+3)
Application Period: 23 March – 11 April 2026
Evaluation Period: 13 April – 24 May 2026
Shortlist interviews: 25 – 30 May 2026
Beginning of term: 8 July 2026

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