Where Do We Go From Here: Reflections on the After Hope Reading Group /  by Naz Cuguoglu

Where Do We Go From Here: Reflections on the After Hope Reading Group

Published in Art, Hope, Action
Edited by Padma Dorje Maitland
Archive Books, 2024

We are proud to share our contribution as Collective Çukurcuma to the anthology Art, Hope, Action, published by Archive Books and edited by Padma Dorje Maitland. Our text, “Where Do We Go From Here: Reflections on the After Hope Reading Group,” reflects on a transnational, eight-week gathering of artists, curators, and researchers held in early 2021—across Istanbul, San Francisco, London, and beyond.

As part of After Hope: Videos of Resistance at the Asian Art Museum, the reading group offered a space for collective mourning and speculative worldbuilding at a time marked by the global pandemic, political unrest, and widespread uncertainty. Together, we read and reflected on texts by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ursula K. Le Guin, Etel Adnan, Octavia E. Butler, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and others.

Our essay also includes a manual for starting your own reading group, an offering grounded in practices of care, collaboration, and shared inquiry.

The publication features contributions from artists, writers, and collectives engaging with themes of resistance, imagination, and the transformative role of art in crisis.

Learn more / order the book:
https://www.archivebooks.org/art-hope-action/

Rupy C. Tut // SFMOMA Catalog /  by Naz Cuguoglu

Every two years, SFMOMA celebrates Bay Area artists and our creative community with the  SECA Art Award. Established in 1967, the award has honored nearly one hundred local recipients with an exhibition and platform for expanding their practices and sharing their work with new audiences. The 2024 SECA Art Award exhibition celebrates Rose D’Amato, Angela Hennessy, and Rupy C. Tut. Each artist has conceived a gallery with new works that bring distinct perspectives, processes, and materials into the museum.

More information about the catalog.

Imagination as a Radical Duty: Sofía Córdova /  by Naz Cuguoglu

CCA Campus Gallery presents Reunited, a collaboration with the San Francisco Advocacy for the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Complementing the exhibition is a unique catalogue available for purchase that was designed by GRL GRP and printed by Colpa Press. The catalogue is a collection of twelve booklets that provides an in-depth look at each artist’s work

Love Letters // Tohu Magazine /  by Naz Cuguoglu

Love Letters is an exchange of letters and poems between two collaborators, work partners but also good friends who used to share the same city but departed due to personal decisions. As the co-founders of Collective Çukurcuma, Mine Kaplangi and Naz Cuguoglu have been experimenting on collective writing in recent years. For this special issue they write Love Letters to one another.

Letters from indeterminate future: Remnants of the archives of reconfigured past // HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt /  by Naz Cuguoglu

Letters from indeterminate future: Remnants of the archives of reconfigured past
by Naz Cuguoğlu, Özge Çelikaslan

Crowstep Poetry Journal /  by Naz Cuguoglu

A Cosmological Feast (For M) / this / try

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A Cosmological Feast (For M) / this / try 〰️

The Art World’s Tainted Love for “Discovering” Artists: The Case of Etel Adnan // HYPERALLERGIC /  by Naz Cuguoglu

“What does the discovery narrative do? On the one hand, it gives more visibility and acknowledgement; on the other hand, it narrows down complicated histories — or omits them altogether. Artists being presented by Western institutions for the first time get portrayed as exhibiting for the first time in their careers. This understanding assumes that they were not acknowledged before. This institutional narrative of “rediscovered” artists therefore creates a myth around their practice. Their histories outside Western institutions or by non-Western curators do not get counted. Eventually, discovery assumes the prerequisite of an acknowledgment from the cultural mainstream, one “naturally” positioned in the West. It creates a hierarchy between West and non-West, between institutional spaces in the cultural mainstream — museums and acclaimed institutions — and spaces and cultures relegated to outsider status: alternative exhibition spaces, galleries, non-Western museums, and small or mid-sized institutions.”

AN ATTEMPT TO RECALL AND REVIVE: WITH JOHN GERRARD ON ENDLING (MARTHA) // Borusan Contemporary /  by Naz Cuguoglu

In the introduction to the project titled Endling (Martha) by John Gerrard, there is a quote by Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon (1872), which touches upon the question of consciousness when it comes to machines, and its similarities to how humans approach animals. While we have been domesticating, taking advantage of, and consuming our nonhuman allies for centuries, Gerrard defines Martha as “a hybrid form, a data object in dialogue with photography, history and ecology.” Keeping in mind that history is subjective, constructed, man-made, and photography is sensitive to power hierarchies (by creating a structure between subject and object), I posed my questions to Gerrard to comprehend how he approaches this triangle of relations coupled with ecology and how he challenges those taken-for-granted narratives, turn them on their heads, and suggest a fresh narrative by keeping his own vulnerabilities present.