SAHA Sustainability Fund

SAHA Sustainability Fund

SAHA Sustainability Fund supports 16 independent art initiatives and publication projects from 7 different cities

SAHA announced the beneficiaries of the SAHA Sustainability Fund as a result of an open call for the sustainability of independent art initiatives across Turkey. With the SAHA Sustainability Fund, which has been expanded to include independent art spaces and initiatives as well as artist books and independent publishing projects, a total of 16 initiatives and projects from the cities of Ankara, Çanakkale, Diyarbakır, Eskişehir, İstanbul, İzmir and Mersin are being funded throughout 2023.

The 54 applications to the SAHA Sustainability Fund 2023, which was announced in early October, were evaluated by SAHA's 4-person project and event coordination team for compliance with the application criteria and budget in the open call, and then prioritized by the 11-person SAHA Association Board of Directors, paying attention to the mission and priority areas of activity of the association. In this regard, SAHA provides a total of 900,000 TL (approx. 46,000 EUR) in net and non-refundable funds to 8 independent art initiatives and 8 new publication projects, each of which receives 50,000-60,000 TL until the end of the year.

Initiatives and publications benefiting from SAHA Sustainability Fund 2023:
Initiatives:
·       Garp Sessions (Çanakkale)
·       Loading (Diyarbakır)
·       Merkezkaç (Diyarbakır)
·       Kültürhane (Mersin)
·       Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası (İstanbul)
·       Performistanbul (İstanbul)
·       Monitor (İzmir)
·       Nesin İstasyon (İzmir)

Publications:
·       Sanatı ve Şeyleri Queerlemek | Queer Art Program (Ankara)
·       Labor of Her Hand Light of Her Eye | Melike Taşcıoğlu Vaughan & Maury Vaughan (Eskişehir)
·       The Motley Jitters | Arzu Yayıntaş, Güneş Terkol, Sevil Tunaboylu (İstanbul)
·       Marmara | Asu Aksoy, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Aslı Uludağ (İstanbul)
·       Taklak | Dilşad Aladağ (İstanbul)
·       Oil, Water & Vitrines: Unreliable Narration in Visual Arts and the Written Word | Çağla Özbek (İstanbul)
·       Surface Phenomena | Ali Taptık (İstanbul)
·       Pedestrians on the Stoney Bridge | Sarp Keskiner, Açık Stüdyo (İzmir)

About SAHA and SAHA Sustainabilty Fund
SAHA Association was founded to support artists, curators, and writers working in visual arts from Turkey in improving their production and development environments, and to enhance their interactions with international art institutions and networks. Since 2011, SAHA has supported over 450 artists, curators, writers, and art initiative projects in 200 non-profit institutions in 44 countries. SAHA Sustainability Fund was used by 5533, Pasaj and Torun in 2014-2015; Apartment Project, BAS, m-est, Torun and Videoist in 2015-2016; Corridor Project Space, MARS, Orta Format, Space Debris and TOZ Artist Run Space in 2016-2017; Loading, MARS, OJ, Orta Format and Tasarım Bakkalı in 2017-2018. SAHA expanded the framework of the funding in 2018-2019 to support the initiatives across 5 different cities: AVTO, Hayy Açık Alan, Loading, NOKS, Performistanbul, sub and Torun.As part of SAHA Sustainability Fund 2019-2020, SAHA provided support for 8 initiatives in 5 different cities: A4 Open Art Space, AVTO, Eldem Art Space, Karantina, Loading, Orta Format, Performistanbul, sub. In 2020-2021, SAHA provided support for 10 independent art initiatives from 5 different cities and an online platform: 5533, Analytic Art Group, Are Projects, AVTO, Darağaç, Kendine Ait Bir Oda, Loading, NOKS, Orta Format, Performistanbul and Senkron. SAHA also formed the SAHA Sustainability Fund to support artists and collectives who want to complete their projects whose production process was negatively affected by the Covid-19 pandemic or to address the issues and problems that emerged during this period: Within the scope of SAHA Sustainability Fund: Covid-19, SAHA also provided funding to 21 different art projects. Throughout 2022, A4 Open Art Space, Altatölye, Arazi, Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası, Darağaç, KIRIK, KOLİ Art Space, Kültürhane, Loading, m-est.org, Monitor and sub benefited from the SAHA Sustainability Fund.

About the initiatives and publication projects within the scope of SAHA Sustainability Fund 2023:

Sanatı ve Şeyleri Queerlemek | Queer Sanat Programı (Ankara)
"In this publication, where we will focus on the moments in which Queer Art permeates in action, painting, photography, performance and art history, we will consider queer art as a field of possibility and action. 21 artists will be invited to this publication and each artist will be asked the following question; usHow do you draw on queer? What are the potentials that Queering art and things involve? When and where do your queering techniques intervene? In the production processes? In the encounter with the audience? In your materials? Or in your content? . Each artist will be allocated a page to answer these questions and these answers will be published in English and Turkish. At the same time, 2 pages will be made available to the artists who will take part in this publication to share the "queer works" they want to be exhibited after their answers."

Garp Sessions (Çanakkale)
Garp Sessions is a summer program that brings artists and thinkers together in Babakale. It creates encounters around a concept and experiments with modes of operating outside of existing institutions, in the periphery, and without a production focus. It prioritizes collective thinking, digesting, and exchange among participants throug reading sessions, teaching sessions, and collective meals. They also plan to undertake a Garp Sessions Book to introduce this network to the wider communities and create a platform where the two can interact. The book will reflect on and present glimpses from past iterations (2019-2022), as well as written and visual materials commissioned from artists and thinkers who haven’t participated in the programme but whose ways and subjects of working resonate with them. 

Loading (Diyarbakır)
Loading is a non-profit art space that aims to enrich contemporary art dialogue in Diyarbakır since 2017. Their founding goal was not to bring together the artists living and working in Diyarbakır under one roof, but rather to resolve the issues they have been encountering in production and project-related issues, to archive the contemporary art practices from the first quarter of the 2000s, and to strengthen the international artistic awareness and interaction in Diyarbakır through various activities. 

Merkezkaç (Diyarbakır)
Merkezkaç Art Collective works in the fields of development and production of art and artists in the cities of Diyarbakır, Batman and Mardin, and transports, shares and archives this production to the national and international arena. Merkezkac Art Collective is a non-profit, independent art collective that can carry out joint projects with public or institutional structures and other independent initiatives, collectives and artists in line with its principles. Merkezkac Art Collective established in 2021, together with Collective Space, which is the first independent gallery of Diyarbakır, brings together art collectives and initiatives as well as artists operating in the national and international arena as an international center focused on research, production, exhibition. Collective Space, as an art space that invites social issues such as identity, gender, power, ecology, alienation, migration to be considered together with the current problems of contemporary art, also aims to contribute to keeping the dialogue environment alive between different art disciplines. 

Labor of Her Hand Light of Her Eye | Melike Taşcıoğlu Vaughan & Maury Vaughan (Eskişehir)
The “Labor of Her Hand, Light of Her Eye” project is about the discomfort we witness in the heavy, rough concrete crushing the delicate fabrics of lovingly crafted items. With a book, it aims to describe how the handicraft, which was produced with skill, grace, and devotion that lasted for hours, was suddenly, violently, buried in rubble by construction machinery. The book deals with the interaction of traditional and contemporary life, especially the status of handmade goods in a globalized, mass- produced and increasingly disposable material culture. In the face of the declining status of handmade objects and brutally homogenizing modernity, we are witnessing the disappearance of many of these traditional practices. The project includes the idea for a book inspired by and documenting handmade items found in a construction dump during a nature walk. Handmade clothes, silk fabrics for dowry, embroidered clothing, photographs, documents and letters found under the concrete pile. The book aims to reveal a character in the light of these finds: a woman living in Turkey in the middle of the 20th century, who is making her own clothes and preparing the dowry chest. With this semi-real/semi-fictional character, supported by personal articles, documentation and fictional biographical texts, we aim to shed light on the beauty and dignity of traditional handicrafts, and to revive a life and talent. 

The Motley Jitters | Güneş Terkol , Sevil Tunaboylu, Arzu Yayıntaş (İstanbul)
“As The Motley Jitters (Arzu Yayıntaş, Güneş Terkol, Sevil Tunaboylu), we are a flexible, independent, intellectually united group that transforms our thoughts occasionally into physical projects. Between 2015 and 2017, we organized workshops called "A Room Of Our Own" where we thought together with women about motherhood and fertility. In 2017, we transformed these workshops into an exhibition project at Ark Kültür with the participation of 23 women artists. In 2022, we organized 4 different workshops with Boğaziçi University students, each consisting of five meetings, in which we questioned the concept of Normalization. Then we held the exhibition "Normalization" at Karşı Sanat with artists and students. Although "A Room Of Our Own" started as a reaction to the uniformized motherhood approaches of those in power, the workshops focused on the different physiological and social cycles of being a woman over time with the contributions of the participants. The main starting point of the exhibition was the book "The Motley Jitters", a collection of interviews we conducted with 104 women of different ages and professions about womanhood. We made a site-specific installation called "Moon Tent" in the exhibition to present the book to the visitors, which includes the topics of women's birth, first menstruation, motherhood, PMS, abortion, miscarriage, and menopause and the visuals produced for these topics, together with the audience. This installation was a tent consisting of paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, and objects inspired by the stories in the book, prepared for the audience to come and read the book; it also hosted several workshops such as "First Period Celebration" and "Women Who Run With the Wolves" throughout the exhibition. we want to prepare the second version of the book "The Motley Jitters" that elaborates womanhood from a more detailed and layered perspective with the contribution of more women from a wider background and with more visuals and art pieces.”

Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası (İstanbul)
A dream country, Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası was founded in 2003 in Beyoğlu, İstanbul by a group of dancers and has realized countless performances, collaborations and international co-productions until 2023, when they will celebrate their 20th anniversary. Since its founding, Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası valued production through sharing and achieved forming its own language. Over time, this production expanded through forms of body, movement, shows and workshops, earning the Company not only its own audience but also help enlist new amateur and professional dancers into the field. Today, the Company continues its dances in pursuit of its dream utopia. 

Marmara | Asu Aksoy, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Aslı Uludağ (İstanbul)
"We propose to produce a publication that presents the mapping technique we devised between gamification mechanics and environmental dynamics as a useful model in engaging with complex environmental issues through the example of the Marmara board-game. “Marmara” is a four-player board-game. Played with the beings of the Marmara Sea as characters, the game is centered on survival in a rapidly changing ecosystem. It’s composed of 38 cards including habitat cards which represent the ecological values and contaminants of the Marmara Sea, and action cards which speed up habitat transformations, trigger position changes and give advantages to the characters. The double-sided habitat cards make up the board which the game is played against. As the game progresses, these cards flip over and make the sea uninhabitable. To win the game, which can only be won or lost collectively, the players must play collaboratively and sustain the habitable environments. We’d like to discuss the game in three sections in the publication. The first includes short texts (2-3 paragraphs max) and illustrations by knowledgeable individuals or artists that expand on the concepts, the phenomena and the beings that compose the game. We’ll develop this section in collaboration with the Marmara Cultures Network. The second section focuses on gamification as a mode of engagement with the environmental and cultural crises of the Marmara Sea, including the research and development process of the game, its logic and sense and the process of production of its illustrations. Lastly, an invited author will discuss the affective space of existents and their collective beings from the perspective of philosophy of ecology. The publication will be in Turkish and its editors are Asu Aksoy, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar and Aslı Uludağ.”

Performistanbul (İstanbul)
Performistanbul is an international performance art platform founded in 2016 with an initial aim to unite performance artists under one roof. Based in Istanbul, the platform continues to embrace its “spaceless” identity by carrying out a flexible work model which consists of collaborating and developing projects with various art institutions, digital platforms and artists in the world. Performistanbul has completed almost 200 performances in various locations, collaborating mostly with museums, galleries, public spaces and international organizations. Performistanbul established Turkey's first Live Art Research Space (PCSAA), in the purpose of making a significant impact on the education and development of performance art by housing essential resources on live art. Together with PCSAA, Performistanbul Publications was founded to translate foreign sources into Turkish in order to publish them on digital platforms in Turkey and to provide further resources in the field. 

Taklak | Dilşad Aladağ (İstanbul)
“Taklak is a research that starts with an encounter on a street I know and continues in unfamiliar countries and archives, producing its own methods and language. It is a multi-layered assemblage of seeds, names, meanings, symbols, testimonies and memories gathered during the wanderings around the Mediterranean. The publication is meant to be a route that travels between these layers. In this journey where representations are as diverse as encounters, it is an invitation that aims to take the viewer on a trip and to make them think about the questions of earth, rooting, and borders that I ask in pursuit of belonging. This journey explores the healing potentials of search and narrative. On the other hand, it is an alternative historical narrative between the personal and the social with what it records.”

Oil, Water & Vitrines: Unreliable Narration in Visual Arts and the Written Word | Çağla Özbek (İstanbul)

“The publication aims to pursue the notion of ‘unreliable narrator’ as an effective construct in revisiting feminist archives and imaginations as it may provide an invaluable method in doubling down on the critical breaks between recorded history and lived reality not only within the bounds of fiction writing, but also in visual arts and archival tendencies. Locating unreliable narration as a critical strategy extending outside the realm of literature which contests both linear history-making, primary focus will be placed on reading works of visual art both from Turkey and the rest of the world possibly together with the works of authors Marguerite Yourcenar, Clarice Lispector, Füruzan and Muriel Spark, focusing on locating where unreliable narrators may be residing in their work and what (common, if any) functions they assume, investigating the intersections of writing versus appearing, activism vis-a-vis artistic production. The publication project will materialize as an experimental, limited edition artist’s book with the collaboration of Kibele Yarman

Surface Phenomena | Ali Taptık (İstanbul)
Ali Taptık’s ongoing series “Surface Phenomena,”the sequel to his previous books “Kaza ve Kader” and “Nothing Surprising”, planned to be published in 2023 by Onagöre as the last book of the trilogy. Taptık examines conditions and spaces he has been drifting in and out of while thinking about technology, food, and healing in the light of concepts from chemistry and material science. Between pictures of a medical operation robot, computer servers of a bank, tiny crystals, and millennials that everyone keeps harping on, photographs of the book are placed to serve as quotations. While the book collects the traces of Turkey’s turbulent politics both in urban and rural settings between 2013 and 2022, it witnesses the production conditions of materials and products that left their mark on this period. Production of non-woven clothes, reclaimed water streams and quarries, relocation of wind turbines are images that we encounter in the last book of this series. A booklet for a chronology and a dictionary of the trilogy spanning through the years 2002 and 2023 constitutes an important part of this artist book. 

Nesin İstasyon (İzmir)
Nesin Station is a hybrid community driven by the past and former participants of the Nesin Villages. As students, coordinators, volunteers, and instructors; they are organizing programs, creating modules, and designing collective experiences with different groups and concepts. This diverse team focuses on supporting the programs of Nesin Art Village, which offers art production and learning possibilities for young participants in an environment open to critical thinking and artistic research. Nesin Villages is an alternative educational institution that offers young people the opportunity to produce and learn in an environment open to questioning and criticism. This institution, which has been in existence for 15 years, contributes to the academic life of individuals, their creative thinking skills and the development of the awareness of taking responsibility within the common life culture. The initiative Nesin Station gained its legal status under the name of Nesin Villages Association in 2020, to be able to support the village and its participants, in particular to make the programming of Nesin Art Village more accessible and provide spaces for artistic and collective production. 

Monitor (İzmir)
Izmir-based non-profit contemporary art platform Monitor focuses on video and film screenings and talks. Monitor does not have a fixed space and organizes contemporary art- oriented displays in collaboration with existing art venues and alternative exhibition spaces. Monitor brings together two artists from Turkey and abroad within a specific concept in each exhibition. Monitor aims to reach anyone interested in art and collaborates with Izmir-based artists, students, academicians, non-governmental organizations and universities. The purpose of this project is to create a display and discussion area in the field of contemporary art through collaborations in Izmir. Monitor also aims to bring innovations to the city in a conceptual and aesthetic sense by creating a formation apart from the ongoing structures and systems. 

Pedestrians on the Stoney Bridge | Sarp Keskiner, Açık Stüdyo (İzmir)
The project "Pedestrians on the Stoney Bridge", conceptualized by Şafak Ersözlü and planned by Sarp Keskiner, brings together 5 contemporary dance performances on 5 publicly accessible stone bridges in Manisa, İzmir, Balıkesir, Çanakkale, Bursa and a field research that will bring together photo-memory practice with sound design. The project, the implementation phase of which will be realized by Teos Culture and Arts Association in collaboration with Open Studio with the support of British Council's "Creative Collaborations" 2023 grant program, is designed to be a project that opens up space for sustainable partnerships wherever it goes, rather than being a one-shot job, and to multiply continuously with site-specific content at each leg. In this context, they want to give widespread visibility to the outputs of the project, leave behind a bilingual art book from the exhibition and strengthen networking activities through this book.

Açık Stüdyo has been established in İzmir in 2016 by Bahar Nihâl Ersözlü and Şafak Ersözlü, aiming at opening new spaces for contemporary performance practices. Defining itself as a performance researches initiative, the collective executes various projects in collaboration with various national and international partners. 

Kültürhane (Mersin)
Kültürhane is a café-library founded by three of the petitioners of the Peace Declaration after their dismissal from their university posts. Since then, Kültürhane has been a venue of resilience by offering a public space hosting people from different socio-political backgrounds interested in different areas. For this purpose, since its opening in September 2017, it hosted hundreds of different cultural and social events. From cinema to literature, feminism to human rights, cycling to sailing, urban culture to cultural heritage, the place has welcomed many visitors who shared their experiences and knowledge.