Bringing together artists from Greece, Serbia, Turkey and the UK, the exhibition offers an interactive experience.
Organized as part of the Connect for Creativity project led by the British Council, in collaboration with ATÖLYE and Abdullah Gül University in Turkey, BIOS in Greece and Nova Iskra in Serbia, TransLocal Copperation exhibition will go digital as of 6 July partnership with the oldest art and technology centre in London, the Furtherfield Gallery. The exhibition can be visited between 6-30 July via the Connect for Creativity website. It features artworks born of cooperation and knowledge exchange between artists from Turkey, Greece, Serbia and the UK seeking translocal solidarity in a hyper-connected world.
The exhibition seeks further cooperation and empathy in a hyper-connected world
As our world has become hyper-connected, it has enabled us to simultaneously occupy or travel through numerous physical and virtual locations. This social and cultural aspect of globalisation is often described in terms of ‘translocality’, where the events, conditions and attachments of one location can rapidly influence and connect with another. Inspired by this definition, the exhibition and the works within it consider how we might organise across distances and differences with and for our translocal communities.
The exhibition features a selection of artworks from those created by artists from Turkey, Greece, Serbia and the UK during art and technology residences at the creative hubs ATÖLYE in Turkey, BIOS in Greece, and Nova Iskra in Serbia. The artworks created by Emmy Bacharach, Georgios Makkas, Ioana Man, Tamara Kametani, Theo Prodromidis and Yağmur Uyanık employ a variety of media and technologies, from VR and 3D printing to probiotic fermentation and ethnographic documentation. Having been redesigned for digital platform by the curators Ruth Catlow and Charlotte Frost, the exhibition creates an interactive visitor experience.
Ioana Man’s ‘Probiotic Rituals’, which is a combination of an AR interface, a website and a series of rituals, have been revisited in the face of Covid-19 and its impact on the artist’s original work. At a time when each of us are engaged in new daily rituals of cleanliness and separation, Ioana Man invites us to come together over new rituals of microbial discovery. Yağmur Uyanık’s 3D printed sandstone sculpture ‘Selfmaking: Layers of Becoming With’ will have five original editions. Randomly selected applicants throughout the online exhibition will receive one of these editions. When the sculpture arrives at its new home, the images will be taken and shared by its new owner using the hashtag #layersofbecomingwith and will be featured at the digital exhibition. Theo Prodromidis’s digital print newspaper ‘An Open Newspaper (You can’t evict a movement)’ has been transformed into a downloadable and shareable format. Georgios Makkas’s multi-channel video ‘Four Stops to Kurtuluş’ will be presented as a video which can be easily viewed. Emmy Bacharach’s VR experience ‘Stream of Consciousness / The Caves of Hasankeyf’ draws attention to the local and translocal significance of Hasankeyf, an ancient city in South Eastern Turkey. Using photogrammetry and visual material collected from the site, the work covers a glimpse into the unique environment of the caves soon to be flooded. ‘Set in Stone’ by Tamara Kametani forms a poetic meditation on the effect of materials on often immaterial-seeming aspects of translocal cultures. While debates rage about legitimate uses and abuses of both privacy and freedom of speech online, this work presents phrases about the life of data etched by hand onto Athenian marble, to provoke a historic reflection on or even memorialisation of the consequences of actions on and offline. The artworks can be visited between 6-30 July 2020 via connectforcreativty.eu website.
Connect for Creativity is part of the Intercultural Dialogue Programme that is led by the Yunus Emre Institute and is co-funded by the European Union and the Republic of Turkey.
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Artist biographies:
Emmy Bacharach is a spatial practitioner, audio-visual artist, and DJ working at the intersection of architecture, sound, film and immersive technologies. Her work explores the social, political and spatial possibilities of appropriating digital technologies. Emmy’s background is in architecture, which she studied at the University of Cambridge and later completed her masters at the Royal College of Art, where she began to explore moving image, sound and immersive technologies. Her installation work ’Proxy Architecture’, which was featured at the Volumetric Ecologies: Environments, Bodies and Mediated Worlds showcase at Goldsmiths Digital Studios, immerses the viewer in a virtual world, a floating city composed of digital fragments of Istanbul, speculating on the collective potential of virtual space. Her research project ‘Sonic Urbanism in Detroit: Techno as a Spatial Act’, investigates the impact of urban space on musical subculture, arguing for the spatial agency of techno production and sonic collectivity in the context of Detroit’s post-industrial urban condition. She is a co-founder of Xcessive Aesthetics, an interdisciplinary design collective exploring data and augmented reality in the built environment.
Georgios Makkas Georgios Makkas was born in Athens in 1977 and had a strong interest in photography from an early age. He graduated from the Documentary Photography course in Newport, UK. His work about the depopulation of rural Albania won the first prize in the Observer Hodge Award. In 2010, Makkas participated in the artist in residence programme 'SETSE’ at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland. His work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Athens Photo Festival, MedPhoto Festival in Rethymno, Fotonoviembrein Valencia, Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Le Voci dell'Inchiesta in Pordenone, DUMBO Arts Festival in New York and the Istanbul Design Biennial, and also held in the permanent collection of the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography. Makkas is interested in the preservation of memory through lens-based media. His practice involves taking portraits, listening and filming people’s stories and documenting the disappearing face of cities.
Ioana Man is a multidisciplinary designer with a background in architecture, set design and critical practice. She produces new encounters between the fields of architecture, science and rituals in order to shape, invent and reimagine alternative futures. Currently, her focus is on a long-term project that aims to bring architects closer to the microscopic scale and to the scientists that harness it. She has had work commissioned by Open Platform at the Wellcome Collection and exhibited at the Architectural Association in London.
Tamara Kametani is a Slovak born London based visual artist working across a variety of media including installation, video, photography and sculpture with an emphasis on site-specificity. Amongst the underlying concerns in her practice are the topics surrounding power relations, surveillance, privacy, and access to information. She is particularly interested in the role that technology plays in the construction of contemporary and historical narratives and the new experiences it enables. She received her master’s degree in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art in 2017. Kametani has participated in a number of artist residencies and exhibited internationally. Recent commissions and exhibitions include Swayze effect, Platform Southwark curated by AGORAMA, London (2019); 404- Resistance in the Digital Age, RAGE Collective, CFCCA, Manchester (2019); For the Time Being, The Photographers’ Gallery, curated by CCA Royal College of Art, London (2019); Digital Diaspora, Studio 44, Stockholm (2019); Summer Show, Florence Trust, London (2018) and Triennial of Photography, Hamburg (2018).
Theo Prodromidis is a visual artist and film director based in Athens. His work has been exhibited and screened in galleries, museums and festivals including Galerija Nova, State of Concept, 1st and 5th Thessaloniki Biennale, 4th Athens Biennale, Werkleitz Zentrum Für Medienkunst and Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt. Since 2017, he has been a Visiting Artist under the program Risk Change at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and a volunteer at the Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus. Ηe is a member of the Institute of Radical Imagination and a member of the assembly of Solidarity Schools Network. He is currently a fellow of Artworks, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship Program, 2019-20.
Yağmur Uyanık is a Turkish artist based in San Francisco with backgrounds in architecture, new media and music. Her work explores repetition, process and intangibility through creating instruments of displacement using light, sound and space with an aim to extend the digital media to a point that it becomes a physical experience. Uyanık has received her MFA in Art & Technology from San Francisco Art Institute as a Fulbright scholar. Her work was shown internationally at institutions including Ars Electronica, Sonar D+, Signal Light Festival, MUTEK, Exploratorium, California Academy of Sciences and Diego Rivera Gallery.