Open Studio Days is a yearly art event and the most comprehensive open studio activity in Turkey where artists open their studios for three days to visitors to come and check out their places of creation and the artworks. From the 5th to the 7th of October, Open Studio Days were held in 40 different artists’ studios all over Istanbul in 2018.
Open Studio Days also aims to create networking among artists and art lovers which is one of the most important things in the presentation of the art and our contemporary art world. Similar with “Open Studio” organizations holding all over the World, Open Studio Days welcomes visitors to local art studios. This year, artists from Hungary, Azerbaijan, and Egypt were amongst participating artists as well.
With the help of the maps produced specifically for the occasion, visitors have a chance to visit 40 studios that are not usually open to the public eye. I was a volunteer at the organization and had the chance to talk with some of the local artists about their themes, philosophies, and aesthetics of their works. All studios to be mentioned are in Yeldeğirmeni, Kadiköy.
On the first day, our team visited Görkem Dikel at her studio and we had a delightful brief interview with her. Görkem’s art studies transformation, movement of matter in space and its interaction with figurative abstractions. She transfers the facts of the universe into daily life by mostly working on abstraction and visualize the transformation of elements.
Second stop was Nur Bardakçı. Bardakçı’s studio “bikolektif” is not only a collective but also serves as a gallery where she displayed her oil paintings, video arts, sound installations and her ink drawings throughout Open Studio Days. Her works are mainly abstract, sincerely composed and calls out to unconscious where she draws them to. Complexity, restlessness, variability, dark pastel colors and infiniteness of human psyche are shown and mixed together delicately. Nur’s relationship with her studio is effectuated deeply and it is full of strong touches that flourish from free association. Which makes the audience step into their subconscious and experience an unknown, dark, creative area.
Yeşim Us is a ceramic artist and a painter who also focuses on street art. She creates figurative abstractions. While experiencing her art, one feels like they are telling their own fortunes because her figurative paintings are made with coffee powder on canvases and on paper. Yeşim’s close observations on society and its ever-changing flow appear humorously on her word installations where she collects sprayed phrases on walls all over Istanbul and by merging the words she recreates street art while documenting its sensation.
Sevim Kaya is a successful young artist and a strong nature lover. She draws with ink and paints with oil color and studies the nature of plant kingdom. She has lots of plants in her studio as well and with direct attraction and observation, she reflects their essence on her works. Asking how it is like to be a plant, she makes the audience enter their nurturing and aesthetic realm.
Beksultan Oğuz and Barış Mengütay shared a studio together, both artists are fed by sociological observations and criticism on our consumerist world. Oğuz studies memory and nostalgia with ceramics, oil color and collages on paper. She recreates the scenes, places, and atmospheres from past years and gives life to İstanbul’s inspirational areas.
Mengütay, on the other hand, creates digital animation art. His works are based on criticism on new age post-modernists and contemporary art. Pointing out “Human is a peripheral unit of cell phones” he questions our relationships with technology. Also brainstorms on new age typologies and their contradictory nature such as hipster culture that is no longer anti-consumerist in fact producing its own fashion market.
Muhittin Can Koyuncu is an interdisciplinary visual artist. He works with oil color, mixed media, and dry paint. His recurring theme is on imposed fixed roles on individuals and effects of patriarchy. He traces social roles from ancient times to our contemporary world and displays their constancy with a critical point of view. While studying strict sacred and religious values on societies he cultivates his own view on the sanctity and brings the observations together with both destructive and constructive manners.
Deniz İkizler is a performance artist, painter, and an art teacher. In her performances and installations, she focuses on flashing the conditioned behavior of the individual. She creates an atmosphere for the audience to observe their learned behavior, creating a room for the audience to change towards their authenticity.
Günsel Demirci Dinler is both an artist and an art teacher as well, she works and teaches in her studio. Her paintings and installations capture intense moments and areas like self-observation, aging, creating a space to meet with self. Art that is in interaction with the audience is highly important for her and she uses mirrors to display her drawings in her new series, inviting the audience to re-create the work with their reflections on the mirror, participating. Investigation on the individual, she also works on ancestry and origin with her series of drawings on hybrid races.
Open Studio Days gave participants a chance to interact with colorful artists in Istanbul, witness the lives and critical minds of the artists, and experience their works along with their good company. Inspiring one another, we shared the power of imagination, dedication on the uncorrupted way of living with and within the art.
To keep up to date with next year’s Open Studio Days event make sure to follow the official Facebook page. For more information and interviews with artists visit the official website of Open Studio Days.
