print April 2022

Serkan Taycan

Lately I’ve been seeing online ads promoting luxury tourism in Istanbul, touting the city as embodying the “new cool.” The ads gloss over the fact that the capital is undergoing unsustainable rates of urban sprawl to prop up Turkey’s flailing national economy. Overdevelopment is a problem everywhere, but it proves particularly damaging for a city with such a multilayered and diverse cultural and natural heritage. Photographer Serkan Taycan’s exhibition “Towards the City” addressed these ecological concerns with four interrelated series of works dating from the past fifteen years. While three of

print October 2021

Ragna Róbertsdóttir

Ragna Róbertsdóttir’s recent exhibition brought together four decades of work, with sculptures and site-specific installations placed inside and outside the confines of the gallery. The preceding generation’s Minimalism, Land art, and process art had revolutionized artistic production by the time Róbertsdóttir started working in the 1980s. The artist’s conceptual and formal frameworks may allude to these predecessors, but her training as a fiber artist, which informs her meticulous process of shaping her materials by hand, sets her work apart. Róbertsdóttir’s use of materials—such as volcanic

picks November 20, 2019

İnci Furni

Istanbul suffered a 5.8 earthquake on the day İnci Furni was scheduled to give a gallery talk about her latest exhibition, “She Waited for a While.” The talk was easily rescheduled, yet the interruption seemed to literalize both the show’s title and its underlying subtext of upheaval and displacement. Featuring sparse, life-size drawings inspired by people glimpsed on the street, inexpensive objects bought from a nearby street market, renderings of these things, and two videos, the exhibition quietly maps the psychogeography of urban life. While Furni has continually dealt with this subject,

Berin Golonu