Alper Turan

Curator, Germany & Turkey

Alper Turan (b. 1993, Ankara) lives and works in Istanbul and Berlin. Turan is a freelance curator and co-founder of the Das Art Project, a curatorial collective. Turan recently curated Positive Space, an exhibition project on HIV/AIDS in Istanbul. This project also lays the ground of his Cultural Studies master research in which he merged critical reading of artworks with (auto)ethnographic accounts. He co-curated the HIVstories exhibition which is currently traveling around Europe. Turan works on curating as ethnography, queer curating and exhibition-making strategies which include fiction and appropriation. Turan will start his PhD in arts at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg (HFBK) in 2020.

Website of the collective:
www.dasartproject.com

Web documentation of Positive Space exhibition
www.positivespaceexhibition.wordpress.com

Appropriation of the very present art and thinking queerly

As a curator who has been working on queer exhibition-making strategies, taking ‘‘queer’’ as a method of contagiousness and fluidity, during his residency at Camargo, Turan will be initiating a collective artistic exercise on appropriation as an archeology of the present art with the participation of young local artists; this appropriation experiment will likely focus on very present time and space, which means appropriation of present artistic productions of the city of Marseille which are visible during the month of January 2020. This exercise with a new body of artists will be repeated in Paris, and in Istanbul in the upcoming months.

Alper Turan is in residence at Camargo from July 15 to August 17, 2021, as part of the Be Mobile Create Together! program.

Be Mobile-Create Together! is led by the French Institute in Turkey, the Embassy of the Netherlands in Ankara, the Goethe-Institut and the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), and is co-funded by the European Union and the Republic of Turkey.