Aykan Safoğlu, İz Öztat, Larissa Araz

The Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig | Germany

SAHA supports Aykan Safoğlu, İz Öztat and Larissa Araz’s new projects at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig between 26 October 2024 – 23 March 2025. Outspoken. Voices beyond The Archive. is curated by Naz Kocadere Ulu.

The exhibition is an attempt to challenge, rewrite and ultimately to outwit the hegemonic canon. It focuses on individuals, animals, objects and historical figures that find a way to assert their presence, despite being deliberately excluded from the (universal) archives. Perhaps the way to outsmart such an unjust setting of single-sided narratives is to object to the usual road taken. Instead, we could opt for a path that guides us through the background, hinterlands and streets that have been neglected. The framework issues an invitation to leave the confines of the dusty old library with its dark ghosts (authoritarian regimes, the Orientalist gaze and other structures of control, including those imposed by the State and the archives). It urges us to reclaim the right to re-inscribe everything that has been left out. The artists gathered here provide a glimpse into various methods that reveal the fragmented narratives of appropriation, manipulation and masking. The group exhibition features photographs, sculptures, installations and videos by artists from different regions of the world.

Participant artists: Aykan Safoğlu, Chupan Atashi, Hamza Halloubi, İz Öztat & Zişan & BAÇOY KOOP, Larissa Araz, Maarit Bau Mustonen.

Aykan Safoğlu (1984, İstanbul) stages interdisciplinary narrations where migration, familial lineage, and historical time contest his own desires, dreams and practice. Appropriating failures, Safoğlu makes intimate memory work that defies media conventions. His hybrid artistic forms fragment, document, reproduce and reorient ontological questions in film, photography, and performance. The artist received his MFA in Photography from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (US)

İz Öztat (1981, Istanbul)

In her collective and individual artistic practice spanning diverse media defined by her reseach, İz Öztat explores the persistence of violent histories through forms, materials, space and language. She responds to absences in official historiography through spectral, intergenerational and speculative fictions. İz Öztat fabricates the (auto)biography of Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego. She takes on Zişan’s archives and interprets them through her practice to construct a complex temporality of action that enables the suppressed past to intervene in the increasingly authoritarian present. The values and methodologies driving her practice have been articulated in relation to struggles against the taming of running waters for profit and progress, queer desire and consensual negotiation of power.

Anna Larissa Araz (Istanbul, 1990)

focuses on alternative histories, non-human witnesses, and denied evidences. Through personal narratives, she researches documents, archives, belongings, ruins, silences, traces, and memories that are not included in, or kept hidden from social memory. Between reality and fiction, she tries to discuss possible futures and unrevealed pasts using mythology and rituals. She uses different mediums in her practice but mainly focuses on text and image-making. She collaborates with different cultural producers such as independent radio stations, local newspapers, sound engineers, graphic designers, perfumers, and so on.

About The Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst

 The Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, a foundation based in Leipzig, is an exhibition space for contemporary art and a museum for art post 1945. GfZK promotes and imparts international artistic positions on its own premises and in public spaces, it initiates cooperations and carries out research-based artistic projects. The fine art collections mirror the interest in the natural integration of diverse forms of expression, of different artistic positions and generations.