miscellaneous

Diyarbakir 2029 is an online exhibition of drawings by students of Hurriyet Primary School in Diyarbakir/Turkey, co-organized by Arzu Ozkal and Ramazan Demir.

http://diyarbakir2029.net

My interest in the area has started after meeting Aycan, a twelve year-old girl from Diyarbakir through a website http://www.kardesinisec.com/ that supports low-income students from all around Turkey. As I began exchanging mails with Aycan, I started to learn details about her daily life and the living conditions of her family. To extend my research, I contacted the principal of her school and started to collect information about her schoolmates’ economic conditions, as well as the challenges the school and education system in this area face.

Diyarbakir 2029 is the first project came out of ongoing conversations with Aycan’s school. We asked children to create artworks representing the daily life from their perspective. With this exhibition, we are hoping to capture the everyday realities of being a student in contemporary Diyarbakir and raise awareness to how these children and their future are being affected from the political controversies in the region.

The drawings are available for a suggested donation of $25. Funds raised will be used to purchase supplies for the students in need.

I’ve just finished writing a book review of Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari’s new book The State of Ata: The Contested Imagery of Power in Turkey, for the next issue of Photoworks Magazine.  I recommend highly.

Special thanks to Patrick Lichty for his editorial assistance.

February 27, 2010, from 5:00 until 10:00pm at Hart Crane Park in the Flats.

“This is the first annual Brite Winter Festival. The goal is to hold an annual festival that gets people out of the house and into our rich urban landscapes to have fun and meet new people. Such an event also acts as an economic stimulus for the surrounding neighborhood and businesses. We believe in Cleveland, and in the richness of the organizations in our community. Brite Winter offers opportunities for collaborations between organizations with diverse purposes: urban design, academia, arts and entertainment, local businesses, and economic development. By partnering with Pop Up City, the host of successful events such as Leap Night and the Bridge Project, we are building on past successes to create something new together. “

The Festival will feature an archive of subjective cartography paired with an interactive mapping installation, curated and designed by Austin Kotting of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative.

I spent most of January in Ankara and Istanbul. I was invited to give two artist lectures at The Pera Museum and at The Turco-British Association. Ankara one was especially ineresting since it was the first time I shared work with family, and luckily received positive feedback.

I’ve also started working on a new project on the environmental politics of different municipalites in the cap city. Research is continuing…

Happy New Year…

Persistent Iteration is on c_m_l.

The Camel Collective began as a loose affiliation of artists, architects, and writers in the Spring of 2005. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, the dominant media’s tacit support for an illegitimate administration, and the hysterical real estate speculation in New York City motivated us to consider how we might orient our individual practices towards collective organization. Our belief in the productive force of collectivity and exchange across disciplines, along with the necessity to address social, political and economic issues as artists is what motivates our activities.

Taboo! Taboo?
CologneOFFV - 5th Cologne Online Film Festival
was launched on 13 November 2009 online!

The 5th edition of CologneOFF stands under the thematic aspect of “Taboo”,  going down to the question of whether “taboo” lost its relevance in the contemporary societies as an instrument of moral and social ruling or not at all.  The selected festival films spotlight that each one in different ways motivating the viewer to reflect and find individual definitions.

The CologneOFF V festival catalogue can be downloaded as PDF.

Relief Valve - Subap (Spring 2010)

http://reliefvalve-subap.info/

Calling Turkish artists and artist groups to submit new and existing artworks responding to the relationship between art, environment, and environmental politics.

Test run for Listen to Your Neighbor took place today, on Detroit Superior Bridge as a part of The Bridge Project. It was fun!

Where: The Entire Span of the Streetcar Level of The Veterans Memorial Bridge (Detroit Superior Bridge) Cleveland, OH.

I’m going to do a little public performance on the bridge, as a part of the Bridge Project—a sketch for a bigger piece that I’m working on: Listen to your neighbor. Literally, listen!

Toplu: Landscapes of New Turkish Suburbia
Photographs by Mark Slankard
Cleveland State Art Gallery | August 28 – October 10, 2009

Image taken from http://www.csuohio.edu/artgallery/

I went to see Slankard’s exhibition the other day. He has been documenting the new developments in the suburbs of Ankara and Istanbul for 2 years. How he captured his frames are amazing, beautiful photographs, but, as I said to the artist at the opening, these pictures disgust me. What is happening in Turkey in the name of urban development; The fixation of middle class single family dormitory like housing.

I worked at an advertising company in 1999, where I did works for a construction firm building these low cost semi-skyscrapers around Turkey. I used to get pictures like Slankard’s, empty concrete structures in the middle of dirt. As the designer, I had to put some green around, make the sky bluer, and perhaps include a few “newly married” similing couples in the final layout to make these things appealing to people. I found this one online, good job indeed.

The fact is Turkey will never become greener, and the sky will never be blue if they continue to sacrifice the lands for  the sake of an immediate profit.

Anyways, if you’re in/around Cleveland, go see Mark Slankard’s photographs, you will hate them—kidding, they are great.