Tate St Ives

United Kingdom

SAHA collaborates with the UK-based Tate St Ives since 2020, with the aim of providing support for the participation of artists from Turkey in the Tate St Ives Artist Residency and Commissions Programme. The productions by the artists working in the atelier spaces at Porthmeor Studios meet with international audiences through solo exhibitions at the Tate St Ives.

SAHA is pleased to announce its support to Cornwall-based institution Tate St Ives for the participation of artist Ahmet Doğu İpek in the fourth collaborative iteration of the “Artist Residency and Commissions Programme”.Following Tate St Ives director, Anne Barlow’s studio visits in December 2024 upon SAHA's invitation, Ahmet Doğu İpek received an invitation to the 2025 program. During the months of April and October, İpek is to make research and develop a new body of work at Porthmeor Studios, which will be unveiled to public with his solo exhibition at Tate St Ives in Fall 2025.

Following studio visits in Turkey by Anne Barlow, director of Tate St. Ives, upon SAHA's invitation, Cansu Çakar received an invitation to the 2024 program to research, produce and present her works.  

The miniaturist- inspired painting installation is the result of two residencies in St Ives, undertaken by Çakar in 2024, during which she became interested in representations of seashells, imagining them as both homes and graves. Laboriously derived from murex sea snails, Tyrian purple was named for its origins in Tyre, a centre of the ancient civilisation of Phoenicia that spread from modern-day Lebanon to trade and settle across the Mediterranean. This rare dye has been used to colour many precious artefacts through time. In parallel, tin from Cornwall and Devon was also a valuable resource across the ancient world. Çakar’s installation re-examines concepts of value, rarity and cultural heritage by speculatively tracing such ancient trade routes, real or imagined. Unfolding across a shell-like spiral of paper resembling an ancient map, it offers a story guided more by oral traditions than historical records.

Burçak Bingöl, one of the former participants of the program with the support of SAHA, who conducted her research and production at Porthmeor Studios between March 1 - April 1, 2022, transformed the space into an kiln-like space in the exhibition Minor Vibrations on Earth between October 15, 2022 - January 15, 2023. The artist's work explores notions of belonging, cultural heritage, identity, decoration and failure by blurring the boundaries between these seemingly distinct notions.

Another artist invited from Turkey, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan's solo exhibition Earthbound Whisperers was held between May 27 and October 15, 2023. During an artist residency with Tate St Ives in 2022, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan became fascinated with Cornwall’s megalithic stones and the legends related to them. Considering human traces evident within nature, Earthbound Whisperers vocalises histories hidden deep within landscapes and politics of invisibility and erasure. Exhibition explores relationships between bodies and landscapes and how surfaces accumulate traces of histories within. 

About Tate St Ives
Alongside Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool, Tate had formed a close link with St Ives when it took over the management of the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1980. As a result of the large number of visitors at the gallery, it was decided to refurbish and extend Tate St Ives. The making of the new Tate St Ives completed in summer 2017. 

About Burçak Bingöl
Burçak Bingöl (b.1976) Born in Görele, raised in Ankara, she lives and works in Istanbul. Her works are in many private and public collections in the US, Europe and the Middle and Far East including The Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York. 
Burçak Bingöl’s works explore notions of belonging, cultural heritage, identity, decoration and failure by blurring the boundaries between these seemingly distinct notions. Through her labor- intensive process of tracing, copying and re-forming, she adopts an analytical approach to new configurations. The works are psychological landscapes that hover between abstraction and representation, rejection and preservation that both embrace and disregard Eastern and Western traditions. Working with various mediums such as ceramics, drawings, video, photography and installation, Bingöl’s works are constant re-working of materials and objects to converge to a repetitive act where fiction and failure merges. 

About Hera Büyüktaşçıyan
Born in Istanbul, 1984. Graduated from Marmara University, Faculty of Fine Arts, (2006). Lives and works in Istanbul. The artist uses the notion of the ‘other’ and combines it with the concepts of absence and invisibility, in order to compose an imaginary connection between identity, memory, space & time through “the other”. In her recent works to inquire the meaning of ‘absence’ within the collective memory, she focuses on urban transformation, which causes disappearance, invisibility, isolation and otherness within the framework of communities, history, time-space and memory. Her most recent works enquire into the meaning of 'absence' within collective memory without focusing on the destructive aspect of nostalgia but more of recreating and reconstructing new realities or representations out of the existence of the invisible. At this point the artist has an archeological and sociological narrative where she gathers different layers and aspects of time and history.

Cansu Çakar (1988, İstanbul) earned a bachelor's degree in the Traditional Turkish Arts Department at Dokuz Eylül University of Fine Arts. Her work is about blending traditional art forms, such as illumination design and miniature painting, with contemporary art practices and topics. By doing so, she challenges the stereotypical classification of traditional expressions and highlights her desire to set them free. In her drawings, paintings, and workshops, she delves into male-dominated subjects through her unique personal investigation and storytelling, which typically center on social, historical, and architectural topics, including expected roles for women, as well as historical and contemporary interpretations of Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. Her works create a symbolic dialogue that hints at the seeming contradiction and continuity of traditions in today's world. Believing that a symbolic language never dies but instead changes forms and survives within the confines of commonly approved norms, she aims to recreate an old visual language that's often considered dead by intervening forces of the living. As such, she redefines the traditional format of miniature in her artistic practice, even while working in long-established styles herself. The artist's interest in the tradition of collective thinking and production is central to her work and informs her practice through her workshops. During these activities, she draws a line between what it means to be a woman or a prisoner in an oppressive society and the aesthetics of traditional art in our contemporary art world. Ultimately, both share the search for a pluralistic language against conservatism and the need for emancipation.