Beginning From the Middle

Yağızhan Çalışkan

Born in Ankara in 1992, the artist is currently working in Istanbul. After graduating from Ankara Anatolian Fine Arts High School in 2010, he completed his undergraduate education with a full scholarship in Plastic Arts and Painting Department at Yeditepe University, Faculty of Fine Arts. He completed his master's degree at the same university and started his Art Proficiency Doctorate program in the Painting Department at Marmara University in 2019, where he is still continuing his studies. He also works as a research assistant at Yeditepe University.

The young artist examines the relationship between human beings and nature on an existential level. With a multidisciplinary approach, the artist, who works in different production areas, sees human creation as nature's effort to understand itself. In his works, without establishing a relationship between time and space, he questions the sharpness of the artificial-natural distinction of human beings and the dogmatic attitude towards nature that develops from this sharpness.

Nihal Gündüz

Lives and works in Istanbul. Graduated from the Photography Department of the Fine Arts Faculty at Mimar Sinan University in 1996. Completed her master's degree in Photography at Marmara University in 1999 and then began working professionally in the fields of advertising and fashion. While continuing to work in advertising and fashion, she also teaches Fashion Photography at Yeditepe University's Faculty of Fine Arts.

Gülercan Hacıoğlu

1960, Bulgaristan doğumlu. 1989 yılında Sofya Ulusal Sanat Akademisinden mezun oldu. 1995-1997 yılları arasında Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi Resim Bölümü’nde yüksek lisansını tamamladı.

Sema Maşkılı

1980, Edirne. Lives and works in İstanbul, TR. Sema Maşkılı, who completed her undergraduate and graduate education at Mimar Sinan University, Department of Painting, has participated in many group exhibitions held both domestically and internationally since 2001. Since 2006, she has held five solo exhibitions, focusing on the concepts of violence, existence, and ego using the human body in her works and questioning the complexity of human nature through these concepts.

Maria Roza

Born in Baku in 1998, lives and works in Ankara. After graduating from the Fine Arts High School of Ankara, she studied at Hacettepe University Painting Department and graduated with a degree. Currently, she is studying in the Master of Fine Arts Program at the same university.

The young artist focuses in her works on the relationship humankind has with animals and with primitivity, and on the structural and functional features of these relations. What she aims for is to make her audience feel the uncanny atmosphere in her works and still provide them with a safe harbour by nesting them in the pleasing harmony and aesthetics of the paintings.

Coşkun Sami

b. 1973, Bulgaria, currently working in Istanbul, Turkey. Sami‘s paintings often incorporate architectural and historical references, while maintaining an affinity for the templates of formalist painting. His limited colour palette supports his drawing-based process, making visible an effort towards achieving pictorial and formal values. Sami‘s paintings demonstrate a nuanced blend of stylistic elements, as he navigates the space between expression, figuration and semi-abstraction. He often incorporates architectural and historical references into his work, such as abandoned buildings from the recent past, stripped of their context and historical specificity, resulting in anonymous and depoliticized homogeneous spaces. His use of muted, earthy tones creates a sense of timelessness and universality, while his brushwork and mark-making imbue the works with a sense of immediacy and urgency. Sami‘s paintings often feature a horizontally-based perception of time, with objects, rocks, organic matter, and voids occupying the same space, with interplays between light and shadow.

His practice explores the power of memory and its potential to resurge or transfigure itself into new conglomerations and physical entities, and is fuelled by an interest in the collective traumas caused by war, displacement and totalitarian regimes, abiding by a certain strain of thought within European post-war painting. Through his attempts to engage with fading or vanquished historical memory, Sami investigates the contradictions that the modernist project in all its aspects has brought, exploring collective memory as a form of storytelling by employing references and motifs of modernity, progress, regress, and the grand narratives of the past and approaching memory as a phenomenon that is intangible and abstract. In some of his paintings, he illustrates how the political is reduced to its grotesque dimension, with power struggles, flag-waving, and the reselling of imaginary dreams. His work engages in a hauntology research of its own, exploring how the agendas of contemporary societies are shaped by ghosts of the past.