Issue #12

Conversation: A conversation with Metehan Özcan on his works and multi-layered aspect at the core of his artistic practice, and on city.

It is not a coincidence that Lutz Bacher, who lives and works in California since the 1970's, named her exhibition in PS1 in 2009 as "My Secret Life." For Lutz Bacher deals constantly with authorship and gestures, the impossibility of placing her works into a single narrative is what makes her disturbing artistic practice quite contemporary.

Smena is the smallest ancient city in Anatolia. The area where the city used to be located was turned into a coastal village, a rescued holiday resort, still without a proper land transport today.

“Dwellings” is Ellie Davies’ project on his conception of housing through the texture of forests and his search for his own identity. For the artist, who is dealing with similar subject matters in his previous projects, forest is also a cultural construct that has a landscape of its own, stratifying through our emotions and concerns.

Mass production materials are usually identical and a slightest alteration is considered as a defect. The function is explicitly definite. However, Hortense La Calvez and Mathieu Goussin make installations from these products and they re-create them in an environment unnatural to them, under water.

Blowback is Pezhman Zahed’s project containing early financial reports of Anglo-Iranian Co. which was founded in the beginning of the 20th century to drill oil in Iran before the company’s nationalization period.

Those were the days in which people formed a collective life in Gezi. Workshops were held, the library was in use, forums were organized in the park. We also handed down a red notebook consisting of 16 pages to Gezi. In the note we wrote, we asked people who were staying, producing, sharing in the park to fill in the pages of this notebook with whatever they wanted, and pass it from hand to hand.