SAHA Talks: Co-creating

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.