Beykoz Kundura - Beykoz Kültür Sanat

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VARDIYA

Kundura Hafıza represents the memory of today's Beykoz Kundura that is a prominent industrial cultural heritage of Istanbul with a history that goes back to Ottoman era and operated as Sümerbank Beykoz Leather and Shoe Factory between 1933 and 1999 after the establishment of the Republic. It explores Beykoz Kundura, which used to be a living space beyond being just a factory when its kindergarten, cinema and library are taken into consideration, with different methods for understanding its historical development within the context of tangible and intangible cultural values.

Kundura Hafıza exhibition, launched in June 2021, covers the inspiration of the production activity interwinding with the daily lives of almost three thousand workers, officers, and their families at the factory as an important part of their lives. It examines Beykoz Kundura as a space of life and the state of 'being interconnected' with selected archive materials and oral historical narratives. Kundura Hafıza archive not only studies the machines that underwent conservation, but also oral historical narratives of old factory workers and their relatives that has been studied since 2015. Hafıza archive continues to grow as new interviews are added to the ones that has been conducted with 150 people up until now. In addition, there are many documents are kept and conserved in the archive with hundreds of photographs such as architectural drawings of the factory buildings, maps, plans, technical drawings of machinery, shoe catalogues, correspondences, general instructions, invoices, job applications, certificates of quality, bills for goods etc.

Vardiya, artist-in-residence program, creates new spaces of reflection and encounter with an experimental, innovative, and inquisitive approach of Kundura Sahne’s performance practices in line with an approach that pursues local wisdom of Kundura Hafıza and preserves elements that would otherwise be lost. It plans a working cycle with the artists, which protects, conserve, and guards the archive. Kundura Hafıza entrusts the archive to the artist who takes over. It creates a field of research through art practice and provides participation and access to the archive by granting the artist the power of interpretation within the context of the main collecting and compiling principle of the archive.

The artists who are invited to Vardiya for working at the archive in certain periods of the year for certain durations transfer their duties to the artist that will take over. The artist decides how to make the transfer in this creative process. The concept and practical outcomes of this system of working in shifts are presented to the audience through an public session.

SİNEM DİSLİ

Sinem Dişli was born in Urfa in 1982. She earned her BFA. She completed her degree in "Sculpture" at Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir and her M.F.A in the "Photography" department at Marmara University in Istanbul. Between 2005-2008, she worked as an assistant curator in the photography department at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art. In 2008, she won a scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York and also participated in visual arts programs at ICP and The Cooper Union. In 2015, she received guest artist invitations from the Triangle Arts Association and ISCP, and in 2020 from the Marble House Project. In addition to her six solo exhibitions to date, the artist has participated in numerous group exhibitions on an international level, such as "A Pillar of Smoke" (The Rencontres d'Arles, 2018), "You Are What You Eat" (Krakow Photomonth, 2019). In 2018, she was listed by The New York Times as one of the "7 Promising Photographers to Watch at the Arles Festival" and was nominated for The Prix Pictet Award in 2019. Her latest work 'Pits and Mounds: A Look at Göbeklitepe' is being exhibited at the Ara Güler Museum and Leica Gallery Istanbul.

SİBEL HORADA

The artist completed their high school education at Robert College. After graduating with a degree from the Visual Arts Department of Brown University in 2003, they pursued a master's degree at Yıldız Technical University's Art and Design Department and won the first prize in the HSBC Sculpture Competition in 2007. Known for works that emphasize process, Horada describes their practice as "artistic in terms of the transformation brought by time, continuity, and the interruption of the process." Among their works is an installation titled 'As If It Never Existed,' which symbolically brings back the remnants of an uprooted old tree to the exhibition space, and the 'Perpetual Monument,' an ongoing project since 2002 made from their own fallen hair, which they plan to continue until the end of their life. In subsequent works such as 'At the Site of the Fire,' the artist relates the past of the city we live in, shaped by fires and migrations, to the present day, treating fire as a moment of radical transformation; through archive research, testimonies, and the archaeology of the recent period, they aim to probe memories and extract a nomadic narrative from the intertwined memories of cities, cultures, and identities.

SENA BAŞÖZ

Working with various mediums, Sena Başöz's works explore the ways of interacting with the unreachable and experimentally reviving what is considered numb-dead-time-barred-lost while investigating healing. The artist often works with archives, which are the tangible materials between life and death. She focuses on the definitions and practices of "care and attention" in a broad sense. The self-repair of the organism and the long-term balancing of nature form the backbone of this narrative. Her recent works investigate the body as an archive and movement as a means of revival. She completed her undergraduate degree in the Economics Department at Boğaziçi University in 2002 and her master's degree in the Film and Video Department at Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2010. The artist has participated in artist-in-residence programs at Cité Internationale des Arts Paris (2017), Atelierhaus Salzamt Linz (2010), and Delfina Foundation London (2020-2022). The artist lives and works in Istanbul.