Term Finale at SAHA Studio

On 19-21 December 2024, SAHA Studio presents the new works of Hüseyin Aksoy, Betül Aksu, Kıymet Daştan, Nadir Sönmez and Zeynep Yılmaz, who participated in the June–December 2024 term, as the result of first open call made for the program.

Over the course of 6 months, the 5 artists attending the program from Istanbul, Izmir and Mardin were visited by 21 different art professionals from Turkey and abroad, including the SAHA Curatorial Program guests. Moreover, the artists shared their research and production processes with the visitors during the mid-term presentations held on 27-28 September 2024 as well as at special gatherings, while focusing on new productions parallel to their open-ended research in distinct media such as drawing, video, performance, and installation.

SAHA Studio Open, organized at the program space located in the 5th Block of the Istanbul Manifaturacılar Çarşısı (IMÇ), can be visited as on 19, 20 and 21 December. The presentations are accompanied by events that touch upon the artists' production processes.

19 December, Thursday

12 – 6 pm    : General visits

6 – 7 pm     : Nadir Sönmez | Performance

20 December, Friday

12 – 6 pm    : General visits

6 – 7 pm     : Betül Aksu | Talk*

21 December, Saturday

12 – 6 pm    : General visits

2 – 3 pm      : Zeynep Yılmaz | Happening & Talk

4 – 5 pm      : Hüseyin Aksoy | Talk

6 – 7 pm      : Kıymet Daştan | Talk

Hüseyin Aksoy focuses on stones, rocks and ruins through paintings, archives and video recordings within the scope of his ongoing work titled When you burn the past, fire saves it, in ashes. He presents this fragmented memory, which he treats as ghostly entities that are instrumental in confronting the past and tries to trace, in an installation consisting of a series of drawings and a video. Betül Aksu’s ongoing work Permessus examines the remnants of an ancient city with an unknown history and undefined borders. While imagining Permessus, the artist delves into the cultural, social, and political systems that normalise the concept of borders. At SAHA Studio, the artist works with a series of photographs as raw images, which were taken during her visits to ancient cities that shaped the groundwork for Permessus. The photographs depict horizontal columns that have not yet been completely excavated from the ground. Through these images, Betül Aksu embarks on an exploration of horizontally expanding, modular, changeable grounds. Kıymet Daştan focuses on spatial and temporal relations through a phrase that can have different meanings in daily life in her project titled Take Care of Yourself developed at SAHA Studio. She presents a series of materials that evoke the ironic contradiction of these words in order to conjure what exactly individuals mean or wish for with the sentences they utter in daily life, while stuck between various crises. Reflecting on art, tourism and sexuality through autobiographical texts, Nadir Sönmez constructs a new narrative on travel with the possibilities of theater, performance and video. At the conclusion of the term, the artist imagines himself as an artist who is to open an exhibition at the Istanbul Queer Museum. In this imaginary context, the artist criticizes the violent relationship between performance art and the body with a humorous theatricality, and dimensionally expands the viewing experience by presenting his video production within this fictional discussion space. Zeynep Yılmaz, who works on performative, visual and printed counterparts of written narratives, kept records that expand with time and space throughout the SAHA Studio program, processing them with different materials and methods. The artist investigates the state of being a producer enters and exits on private and public planes and focuses on the potential of everyday issues to be the protagonist by means of the work she presents at SAHA Studio Open.