Between Neighbors, Strangers, and the Bedpost
5-14 August, 2022
Between neighbors, strangers, and the bedpost is an altered translation of the Turkish saying “laf aramızda”. The original saying refers to gossip that happens between two people (laf aramızda
literally meaning “the word is between us”). For our residency programme in the fishing village of Babakale we have altered the saying to think about the relationship that will undoubtedly
manifest between the local residents and our presence. The hospitality and friendliness of the neighbor, or the tension and skepticism of a stranger. We will also explore these notions in a broader sense, among other parallel communities. What is the gossip about us, from the weeds? Or the trees? Or the sea? The programme will unfold in a series of activities exploring these
ideas. Activities may include intentional interactions with the neighbors, games, children workshops, gift exchange, performances, garden building, postcard sending, relational cooking, swimming, readings, etc…
Facilitators
Gizem Karakaş
Gizem Karakaş is an artist and cultural worker based in Istanbul. In her practice, she focuses on the struggles, ironies, comedy and poetry of everyday life with semi-fictional narratives of an individual becoming, navigating interpersonal and context-based relationships. Her photo, video, sound, performance, and text-based works explore the concept of sincerity in relationships through the ambiguous areas that are left between the intimate and the public, reality and fiction, art and life. Ongoing collective processes are central to Karakaş’ practice. She is interested in shared authorship and collaborative working methods. She is a member of the collectives, HAH since 2017 and Medyartiz since 2011. She is one of the faces of Hayırlı Evlat since 2017. She is currently the Cultural Activities Coordinator in Saint-Joseph French High School.
David Horvitz
Playful and poetic, the works of David Horvitz, an ocean romantic, based in Los Angeles, California, meddle with the systems of language, time and networks, hyper-paced Zoom calls, emails, and images transmitted through screens. Eschewing categorization, his expansive nomadic body of work, traversing the forms of photographs, word of mouth and physical movement or distribution, artist books, performances, memes, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, weather, travel, walks, and watercolor, is presented through examining questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing this distance. Harnessing image, text, object and flows which he mobilizes to circulate and operate independently from himself, penetrate ever more effectively the intimate sphere. Left face to face with his works, in the postal system, libraries, and airport lost and found services, even engaged into action, our attention to the infinitesimal, finding loopholes and alternative logics within them, to the minute but important details and to the imaginary comes to the fore. As lullabies imprinted in our head, Horvitz deploys art as both object of contemplation and as viral or systemic tool to effect change on a personal scale. David Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real. Shifting seamlessly pebbles often possess a naturally frosted finish.
Participants
Ulufer Çelik
Ulufer Çelik (b. 1992, Antalya) is a Turkish artist, who lives and works in Rotterdam. She completed her studies in the MA Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute in 2018. Her artistic practice explores the potentialities of narrative and myth-making, that is expressed through moving image, poetry, memory and sound. Her multi- layered work is supported with archeological, historical and spatial traces. She is a part of Eat-House Food Collective, that provides affordable and cultural eating experiences for communities in the Rotterdam South, and a member of Putsebocht 3 and W1555 Artist Community that are resided in Rotterdam South. Her work has been exhibited in several shows at Growing Space, Corridor Project Space, Are Projects, Rib, State of Concept, Yellow Brick Gallery, Litost Gallery, Institute for Provocation, Belmacz Gallery and Wuerttembergischer Kunstverein.
Maryam Khasawneh
Maryam Al Khasawneh is a multidisciplinary researcher and photographer from Jordan. Her work stands at the intersection between historical archival research, photography and food and plant sustainability. Having participated and organized workshops on Food Design, her photography is very much focused on relationships and interdependencies between human and plant species. She has participated in multiple solo and group photography exhibitions around the Arab world, including Gulf Photo Plus and Darkroom Amman, and is currently participating in the Criticae Documentary Masterclass: Exploring Personal Narratives led by the PH museum.
Lucia Santini Ribisi
Lucia Santina Ribisi (they/she. 1997, Los Angeles.) investigates effective and equitable means of promoting environmental and reproductive justice. Her live performances, lectures, and videos blend stories of troubled ecologies with grassroots intervention strategies and meditations on collective healing. Community care as self care is important to the sustainability of her activist art practice; she is a birth and postpartum doula, herbalist, and meditation facilitator. Lucia has collaborated with many environmental activist groups, focused on direct action and Indigenous-led movements. As a teenager, she was commissioned for artistic collaborations with fashion brands such as Saint Laurent Paris, Adidas, and Nike. Her internationally recognized art has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Vogue, Wallpaper*, and many other publications. She has been featured in group exhibitions at the New Museum in New York and MOCA in Los Angeles. She was a pioneering mentor in the Hammer Museum’s Art + Activism high school summer program before graduating from UCLA Honors College, Class of 2022 (B.A. Gender Studies m. Lit & the Environment).
Jennifer Chert
Jennifer Chert was born in Italy in 1979 and lived there until 2006. She started an early career in the art scene, with her most significant experiences as an editorial assistant for Flash Art Magazine (1999-2003) and gallery assistant for ZERO (2003-2006), both in Milan.After moving to Germany and working for Johann König, Chert founded her gallery in a garage in Kreuzberg in 2008, beginning to represent young, emerging, international artists.Over the years, the gallery also began to focus on publications, published either personally or in collaboration with external editors. In 2016, Florian Lüdde joined the gallery as a partner, which took up the name of ChertLüdde and continued to grow its program by integrating a space dedicated exclusively to very young artists and a research program on historical positions, mostly overlooked.The gallery also hosts the Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt, a non-for-profit long-term exhibition and publication project presenting the archive of Mail Art works collected by the two German artists from the beginning of the 1970s until the early 1990s. In early 2022 ChertLüdde moved into a new space in Berlin Schoneberg, where it now integrates a bookstore, hosting regular events and a growing range of artists’ publications and contemporary writings.Since 2018, Jennifer Chert has been part of Art Basel’s selection committee as an expert for the Statements and Feature sectors.
Ada Özsar
Ada Özsar entered Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of Performing Arts in 2017 and is still studying. During his years at the school, he performed in various dance and theatre shows. In 2018, he reopened Bilgi Stage, the only theatre company at Bilgi University, with his friends from the department and took various roles for five years such as actor, trainer, writer, director within the club. From 2013 to 2020, he worked as a volunteer at the Theatre Madrasah at regular intervals, and had the chance to attend and/or observe the workshops of various instructors from the Workcenter Of Jerz Grotowski and Thomas Richards institute. In 2021, he founded the performing arts troupe called Free Walking with his friends working in the same field and still continues to work within the troupe. In 2021, he joined the TiyatroPol group and took part as an actor in the site-specific play Çok Uzak Çok Yakın. In the 2021 – 2022 season, he presented the programme “The Garden of Insanity” on RadyoModyan with Buğra Can Şahin, where they examined Ancient Greek Tragedies and talked about today based on those texts. As a graduation project of the Department of Performing Arts, he created the play Yerinde with Zeynep Çamlı, which they performed on various stages and art galleries after his graduation. He is currently doing an internship at Collettivo Hospites company in Italy. In addition to these, he has been writing plays, poems and stories for a long time or researching the formal and contextual possibilities in which these genres are intertwined.
Ayşe Köklü (as neither present not absent participant)
Ayşe Köklü (b. 1988 in Istanbul, Turkey) is an artist-educator, living and working in London. In her practice, language and expression are constant subjects of fascination and puzzlement. Drawing from her background in visual communication design, linguistics, philosophy and pedagogy, she attends to various questions, problems and tensions related to them in a speculative, interdisciplinary and collaborative manner. Since 2016, she has been an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins and joins this with her experience working at grassroots arts organisations and charities, where she develops and leads programmes that tackle social injustices in access to creative opportunities.