End of 10th Term at SAHA Studio

24 - 27 December 2025

SAHA Studio is presenting the new works developed by Can Memişoğulları, Suat Öğüt, Neval Tarım, Gizem Ünlü, and Mk Yurttaş, who took part in the 10th term of the residency program, following the open call, to the public between 24–27 December 2025 at its program spaces located in İMÇ.

The five artists, participating in the program from Istanbul and Amsterdam, were visited over the course of six months by 32 art professionals from Turkey and various other countries, with whom they shared their practices and ongoing projects and received feedback. In addition, the artists held regular meetings with Nikolaos Akritidis, a Brussels-based independent curator and this year’s guest of the Visiting Curator Program initiated in 2021 by SAHA and ARTWORKS (Athens). Akritidis’s reflections from his meetings with the artists during his six-week stay in Istanbul are presented to visitors as a text within SAHA Studio Open. Beyond the individual meetings organized throughout the term, the artists had the opportunity to share their research and pre-production processes and receive feedback on their ongoing works during the Midterm Gathering, held between 25–27 September 2025 in parallel with the 18th Istanbul Biennial. Following the Midterm Gathering, as an extension of the program, the artists visited the 36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in October.

Taking place at SAHA Studio’s spaces located in İstanbul Manifaturacılar Çarşısı (İMÇ), Block 5, SAHA Studio Open is open to visitors starting from Wednesday, 24 December at 3 pm. Alongside the presentations and gatherings, the program is accompanied by events, talks, and performances addressing the artists’ production processes. For further information, please follow SAHA’s website and social media accounts.

24 December, Wednesday
15:00 – 19:00 : General Visits
15:30 – 16:00 : Neval Tarım | Listening Session
16:30 – 17:30 : Mk Yurttaş | Dragon and Donkeys (Solo Performance)
18:00 – 19:00 : Artist Talk | Mk Yurttaş

25 December, Thursday
12:00 – 19:00 : General Visits
14:00 – 15:00 : Guided tour with the artists
15:30 – 16:00 : Neval Tarım | Listening Session
16:30 – 16:40 : Mk Yurttaş | Broken Key (Participative Performance)
17:00 – 17:30 : Mk Yurttaş | S.A.A.B. no. 2 (Solo Performance)
18:00 – 19:00 : Talk | Can Memişoğulları & Ozan Ünlükoç

26 December, Friday
12:00 – 19:00 : General Visits
14:00 – 15:00 : Guided tour with the artists
15:15 – 15:45 : Neval Tarım | Listening Session
16:00 – 16:15 : Mk Yurttaş | Hamitbey and Beydağları (Lecture Performance)
16:30 – 16:55 : Mk Yurttaş | An Architectural “Brief” (Solo Performance)
17:00 – 18:00 : Talk | Gizem Ünlü & Can Küçük

27 December, Saturday
12:00 – 19:00 : General Visits
13:00 – 14:00 : Porkish Brunch | Suat Öğüt & Zuza Banasińska
14:30 – 15:00 : Neval Tarım | Listening Session
15:30 – 16:00 : Mk Yurttaş | Toria 8022, We will save you! (Collective Performance)
17:00 – 18:00 : Talk | Neval Tarım & Cevdet Erek & Merve Ünsal

Can Memişoğulları concludes his six month SAHA Studio residency with two projects grounded in the surroundings of İMÇ. Strategies of Survival of Things revisits an instant experienced by the artist in his own studio through the lens of İMÇ, questioning the symbiotic relationships between objects. His field research conducted in Blocks 5 and 6 where the program spaces are located transforms into an interactive map, proposing a new spatiality centered on object relations. The other facet of the research, Ghosts of İMÇ, refers to the marketplace’s place in public memory. Particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, when İMÇ became the heart of Turkey’s music industry, stories and anecdotes embedded in the bazaar’s oral memory reemerge today within the marketplace. Multi channel sound installations extending beyond the studio into the bazaar allow socially embedded musical fragments to resonate once again, reminding visitors of İMÇ’s layered history.

Suat Öğüt’s work Echoes of Silent Hums revolves around the concepts of property and inheritance, taking protest movements as its point of departure. Referencing the past, the installation reflects on how protest movements take shape today, adopting a palimpsestic strategy. Slogans, discourses, and archival documents overlap, re appearing on surfaces reclaimed in the public sphere and proposing a new understanding of inheritance. Works that evoke censorship through mosaic like, pixel based visual materials merge with metal pipes, elements frequently encountered in public space, to form a new object of inheritance. Playing a central role in the project’s spatial configuration, the metal pipes reference the route of the 1961 Saraçhane Rally, functioning both as a map and as carriers of contemporary elements, bringing temporal layers together on a single surface.

Ash Diaries by Neval Tarım focuses on the history of the Tahir Paşa Mansion in Üsküdar, where her family once lived. Burned down nearly fifty years ago due to a stove pipe and subsequently rebuilt multiple times, the mansion appears with different architectures across different memories. Tracing recollections and impressions related to the mansion, the artist begins the project by investigating family narratives, guests’ memories, and the lives of former tenants, constructing a new multilayered oral memory. Details that sometimes overlap and sometimes diverge, described sounds, and audio recordings taken around the mansion’s remnants come together in the studio space through modules made of stove pipes, proposing a new form of spatial memory.

Throughout the program, Gizem Ünlü conducted observations and field research in the Unkapanı district, where SAHA Studio is also located, questioning how the region’s culture of display, including shop windows and signage, resonates beyond social consciousness. She explores the material associations of the sensations evoked by the landscape created through acts of display and expresses feelings of suppression and compression generated by the gestures of looking or refusing to look through material interventions extending across the studio space. Inside the Trap examines, through a more fragile language, the unconscious social reflections of the intense visual violence encountered in everyday life.

Shaping their practice around the concept of the posthuman, Mk Yurttaş works on the second phase of a project initiated in 2023 with the BAS Artist Books Collection under the title UNVEIL. In this phase, Mk examines SAHA supported projects between 2011 and 2024 as a database through three key words: perform, human, and body. Alongside database research, reflections on encounters experienced during the program take the form of an artist book, as with the BAS publication. Following the Midterm Gathering, the sense of togetherness experienced by Mk becomes integrated into the research as the concept of “we”. Initially unfolding within the studio space and later extending into the public realm, it manifests at times as collective and at times as solo performance series.