Hakan Topal
Hakan Topal is an artist, engineer, and sociologist, living in Yalikavak and Brooklyn. He is an Associate Professor of New Media and Art+Design at Purchase College, State University New York.
He was the co-founder of an international art collective, xurban_collective (2000-12), and exhibited his collective and individual artworks and research projects extensively, in institutions such as the 8th and 9th Istanbul Biennials; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; MoMA PS1; Platform, Istanbul; the 9th Gwangju Biennial and ICP Museum, New York. Topal represented Turkey in various international exhibitions including the Turkish Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennial. His texts and projects have been featured in various international journals, books, and catalogs.
He studied engineering (B.S.), Gender and Women’s Studies (M.S.) at Middle East Technical University and he received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research.
For more information, please visit: http://hakantopal.info
Address: Brooklyn, NY
He was the co-founder of an international art collective, xurban_collective (2000-12), and exhibited his collective and individual artworks and research projects extensively, in institutions such as the 8th and 9th Istanbul Biennials; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; MoMA PS1; Platform, Istanbul; the 9th Gwangju Biennial and ICP Museum, New York. Topal represented Turkey in various international exhibitions including the Turkish Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennial. His texts and projects have been featured in various international journals, books, and catalogs.
He studied engineering (B.S.), Gender and Women’s Studies (M.S.) at Middle East Technical University and he received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research.
For more information, please visit: http://hakantopal.info
Address: Brooklyn, NY
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Publication Projects by Hakan Topal
Temporary Assembly of Living Things brings together three related projects that have never been exhibited in Turkey. Still Life (2012-16)* is a documentary-based conceptual video composed of silent video portraits of the Roboski Families. Through durational images, the work highlights the political agency of the victims’ relatives in the face of injustice and continuing state violence and harassment.
Soil.Water.Ash., I & II (2014, 2022) is composed of two performative videos and an installation produced during the Yatağan power plant worker’s strike against the privatization of Yatağan, Yeniköy and Kemerköy coal power plants, and the ongoing Ikizkoy Resistance against the coal mine destroying the ancient forest. The project presents staged demonstrations and poetically explores some of visible contradictions and invites the audience to think about the rights of both living and non-living things together.
The Golden Cage (2022) is an installation based on the northern bald ibis (a.k.a “kelaynak” in Turkish), the most endangered migratory bird in the Middle East. When Palmyra fell to ISIS, the kelaynak colony, which migrates from Northeast Africa to Birecik (a small town near the Turkish-Syrian border), faced total extinction. In March 2016, the Birecik Kelaynak Reproduction Center decided not to release the birds from the confinement cages to protect them—the center has been keeping a semi-wild population since the late 1970s. The Golden Cage refers to a set of confinements amidst the never-ending catastrophes in the region; it is a poetic examination of artifacts, ruins, water bodies, and organisms spread across a highly nationalized terrain. As the embodied symbol of the state, the cage is enacted through a text translated into multiple languages to create new associations about borders, migrations, entrapments, and untranslatability.
February 2018.
ISBN 978-0-9836031-3-9
84 Pages
The project is dedicated to 34 young souls from Roboski village, Şırnak, Turkey, who viciously killed by the Turkish State on December 28, 2011, in an air strike.
A limited edition, 100 signed copies are for sale. All proceeds from the sale of this book will go to Roboski Families.
Artist copies will be provided to Roboski families and libraries for free.
Thanks to:
Ferhat Encü, Veli Encu and the Encü Family for their hospitality and help.
Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development for their generous support. Special thanks to Joumana El Zein Khoury
Articles & Book Chapters by Hakan Topal
The meeting took place at the London Serpentine Galleries’ bathrooms in the summer of 2016. During the three-hour-long gathering, a curator, an artist, and an architect locked themselves in the bathroom very early in the morning. It was an appropriation of a Brutally Early Morning™ meeting to discuss some of the most pressing cultural and political issues of our times. This candid conversation was later edited to fit into the format of this article.
>> CLICK LINK TO ACCESS THE ARTICLE.
The New School For Social Research, New York. August 9, 2016
http://www.publicseminar.org/2016/08/pre-coup-coup-and-the-media-intellectuals-in-turkey/
But not so fast. This story is about endless boom, its spectacle and parallel stories.
The vast area delineated by the MENASA region has seen a far-fetched socio-political and cultural transformation. The joyful intoxication of the Arab Spring spirit is gone, replaced by social anxiety. The Gezi Uprising was not successful in overthrowing authoritarianism, but increased its grasp. In fact, although the local contexts are very different from each other, the people of the MENASA region share a common destiny. A new form of Islamist neoliberal conservatism is destroying the potential for alternative political life; society as a whole is being reengineered according to newly invented Islamic moral codes. Now, one thing is clear: the boom is actually an implosion of socio-cultural infrastructure. It is decimating cultural, archaeological, and historical artifacts; collapsing the education system, and dissolving already-weak state functions.
Implosion is a spectacle that we all watch curiously. Booom. And the show is over. And staged again. This vicious cycle has to end. After the downfall, one has to reimagine a brand new future. In this article—even though it will have an inevitable cynical tone—I will speculate on the possibility of alternative constitutive narratives, new artistic, cultural and intellectual formations, networks and new institutional models. I will argue that there has been enough watching and complaining. It is time to get to work. A work within.
Temporary Assembly of Living Things brings together three related projects that have never been exhibited in Turkey. Still Life (2012-16)* is a documentary-based conceptual video composed of silent video portraits of the Roboski Families. Through durational images, the work highlights the political agency of the victims’ relatives in the face of injustice and continuing state violence and harassment.
Soil.Water.Ash., I & II (2014, 2022) is composed of two performative videos and an installation produced during the Yatağan power plant worker’s strike against the privatization of Yatağan, Yeniköy and Kemerköy coal power plants, and the ongoing Ikizkoy Resistance against the coal mine destroying the ancient forest. The project presents staged demonstrations and poetically explores some of visible contradictions and invites the audience to think about the rights of both living and non-living things together.
The Golden Cage (2022) is an installation based on the northern bald ibis (a.k.a “kelaynak” in Turkish), the most endangered migratory bird in the Middle East. When Palmyra fell to ISIS, the kelaynak colony, which migrates from Northeast Africa to Birecik (a small town near the Turkish-Syrian border), faced total extinction. In March 2016, the Birecik Kelaynak Reproduction Center decided not to release the birds from the confinement cages to protect them—the center has been keeping a semi-wild population since the late 1970s. The Golden Cage refers to a set of confinements amidst the never-ending catastrophes in the region; it is a poetic examination of artifacts, ruins, water bodies, and organisms spread across a highly nationalized terrain. As the embodied symbol of the state, the cage is enacted through a text translated into multiple languages to create new associations about borders, migrations, entrapments, and untranslatability.
February 2018.
ISBN 978-0-9836031-3-9
84 Pages
The project is dedicated to 34 young souls from Roboski village, Şırnak, Turkey, who viciously killed by the Turkish State on December 28, 2011, in an air strike.
A limited edition, 100 signed copies are for sale. All proceeds from the sale of this book will go to Roboski Families.
Artist copies will be provided to Roboski families and libraries for free.
Thanks to:
Ferhat Encü, Veli Encu and the Encü Family for their hospitality and help.
Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development for their generous support. Special thanks to Joumana El Zein Khoury
The meeting took place at the London Serpentine Galleries’ bathrooms in the summer of 2016. During the three-hour-long gathering, a curator, an artist, and an architect locked themselves in the bathroom very early in the morning. It was an appropriation of a Brutally Early Morning™ meeting to discuss some of the most pressing cultural and political issues of our times. This candid conversation was later edited to fit into the format of this article.
>> CLICK LINK TO ACCESS THE ARTICLE.
The New School For Social Research, New York. August 9, 2016
http://www.publicseminar.org/2016/08/pre-coup-coup-and-the-media-intellectuals-in-turkey/
But not so fast. This story is about endless boom, its spectacle and parallel stories.
The vast area delineated by the MENASA region has seen a far-fetched socio-political and cultural transformation. The joyful intoxication of the Arab Spring spirit is gone, replaced by social anxiety. The Gezi Uprising was not successful in overthrowing authoritarianism, but increased its grasp. In fact, although the local contexts are very different from each other, the people of the MENASA region share a common destiny. A new form of Islamist neoliberal conservatism is destroying the potential for alternative political life; society as a whole is being reengineered according to newly invented Islamic moral codes. Now, one thing is clear: the boom is actually an implosion of socio-cultural infrastructure. It is decimating cultural, archaeological, and historical artifacts; collapsing the education system, and dissolving already-weak state functions.
Implosion is a spectacle that we all watch curiously. Booom. And the show is over. And staged again. This vicious cycle has to end. After the downfall, one has to reimagine a brand new future. In this article—even though it will have an inevitable cynical tone—I will speculate on the possibility of alternative constitutive narratives, new artistic, cultural and intellectual formations, networks and new institutional models. I will argue that there has been enough watching and complaining. It is time to get to work. A work within.
"On the New Philosophers and a More General Problem" Source: Discourse, Vol. 20, No. 3, Gilles Deleuze: Areason to Believe in this World (Fall 1998), pp. 37-43. Published by: Wayne State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41389496