Sculpture (Sculpture)

Burak Delier’s sculpture Homage to Balotelli’s Missed Trick is a symbol of resistance to the demand for success and performance. The sculpture represents Italian soccer player Mario Balotelli, who intentionally missed an opportunity to score during a 2011 game between LA Galaxy and Manchester City. The miniature Balotelli stands on his left foot, raising his right foot to kick the ball.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Yoshinori Niwa’s investigation into the monetary system and material goods is witnessed across a range of his works. As the title of this work indicates, Niwa visits several currency exchanges in the market in Istanbul and proceeds to continually exchange from one currency into another until he has no money left, going against the grain of the economy. The laborious act of exchanging the currency back and forth does not create any profit.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Wonderland is a music video for the Turkish hip-hop group Tahribad-I Isyan (Rebellion of Destruction). The young hip-hop artists respond with anger and defiance to their forced expulsion from Sulukule, a historic Roma settlement in Istanbul, due to a redevelopment project. Their lyrics address issues of gentrification and inequality, while their actions show the possibilities for both violent and artistic rebellion.

Photography (Photography)

Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society. Named after an American daytime soap opera that been running for over forty years, Days of Our Lives is a series of six photographs that explore contemporary Europeaness. Here, domestic, everyday scenes drawn from French paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon——preparing food, relaxing, reading and playing music, giving charity to the poor, being evicted from home, or going off to War—are reenacted by Muslim Nigerians, Iranians, Turkish, and Buddhist Burmese minorities.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Off-White Tulips is an intimate, meditative, and tender essay-film composed as a fictional exchange between Black gay writer James Baldwin and the artist, Aykan Safoglu. The work is primarily structured around Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s scholarly reconstitution of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum between 1961 and 1971, as well as autobiographical notes and intimations gathered throughout the years. Safoglu produced Off-White Tulips early on in his career when he was in the process of acquiring permanent residency in Germany.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Prisons is part of a series of videos, entitled Our Body is a Weapon , representing individuals who affirm the body as a place of political and social resistance. In this video, two young women used their bodies as a weapon of war, participating in a hunger strike in Turkish prisons in the year 2000. This hunger strike was violently repressed by the army.