Written for Tuğçe Evirgen Özmen’s exhibition “mirror remembers” at Staircase, for more information about the exhibition click here.
samfiftyfour Issue VIII /
To order copies: click here.
Onomatopee /
Lebriz Collection Book /
Love Letters // Tohu Magazine /
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.
Reforming Relationships in the Classroom // Art Asia Pacific /
Review: Carlos Villa Worlds in Collision // Art Asia Pacific /
Letters from indeterminate future: Remnants of the archives of reconfigured past // HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt /
Letters from indeterminate future: Remnants of the archives of reconfigured past
by Naz Cuguoğlu, Özge Çelikaslan
A Cosmological Feast (For M) + try + this // Crowstep Poetry Journal /
A Cosmological Feast (For M)
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A Cosmological Feast (For M) 〰️
The Art World’s Tainted Love for “Discovering” Artists: The Case of Etel Adnan // HYPERALLERGIC /
“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 /
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.
AN INTERVIEW WITH OLA KOLEHMAINEN ON THE SİNAN PROJECT // Borusan Contemporary /
“Even in the early times of Christianity, buildings and the light were used to enhance the spiritual experience. This sensational use of light was applied to the huge scale of Hagia Sophia, inspiring Sinan to develop it further.”—Ola Kolehmainen
Fragmented Apocalyptic Thoughts on Healing, Mountains, Aliens, and Other Cosmic Events // Hamam Magazine /
AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKA TAJIMA // Borusan Contemporary /
“Like you mentioned earlier, we have this longing to be around other bodies. What we are experiencing now is just an accelerated version of what was already happening. It's an extreme moment of disassociation and disembodiment.”—Mika Tajima
Dear M // For "Beyond Limits" by Daniel Stubenvoll /
AN INTERVIEW WITH BOOMOON ON HIS BOSPHORUS PROJECT // Borusan Contemporary /
Texts and Interviews / University of Washington - School of Art + Art History + Design /
Across the Blue Venus / The Wattis Institute /
This story is an experiment in speculative fiction to imaginatively bring the artworks featured in the exhibition The Word for World is Forest together. (This text was published in the exhibition catalog, for more information, please click here.)
Interview with Rosha Yaghmai / The Wattis Institute Online Library /
Artist Rosha Yaghmai and Wattis curatorial fellow Naz Cuguoglu discuss psychedelic spaces, playing with scale, a spider's view of the world, and the process behind Yaghmai's exhibition at the Wattis.
Rosha Yaghmai's solo exhibition Miraclegrow took place in 2019.
Rosha Yaghmai (b. 1978; Santa Monica, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work was most recently shown in Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and has been exhibited at TATE St. Ives, England (2018); Marlborough Contemporary, New York (2017); and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles (2017).
CONVERSATIONS: NECMİ SÖNMEZ / Borusan Contemporary /
Necmi Sönmez, PhD, has most recently curated the exhibition, They are Uttered and Left Unfinished All the Loves in the World II, on view at Borusan Contemporary until March 8, 2020. We are going to publish this extensive interview with Sönmez, who works with the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, in two parts.
Inviting a curator to an institution’s collection could mean various things: A dialogue or a monologue—emptying all the existing narratives to define them with new meanings or reshuffling them around. These collaborations require horizontal allies and generosity from both sides—an attempt to find the undercommons in a world of broken relationships.
Borusan Contemporary has invited seven curators in the last six years to its ever-growing collection of new media art to unlock these probabilities. This series of conversations is a curious response to this cultivating network of associations and relationships, marked with site-specificity and temporality, in a city that is always in flux.
– Naz Cuguoğlu