Applications have started for the Akbank 44th Contemporary Artists Award Competition.
Applications have started for the Akbank 44th Contemporary Artists Award Competition is organized in cooperation with the Painting and Sculpture Museums Association, Elgiz Museum and Akbank Sanat, in order to support developments in the field of contemporary art and support young artists, The applications will be evaluated by the jury and the works selected to be exhibited will be presented to art lovers at the exhibition to be held at Elgiz Museum between May 14th – July 31th, 2026.
Application Deadline: 24 March 2026
* Click for the competition specifications .
* Click to apply fort he competition.
Jury Members:
Zeynep Burçoğlu (Architect, exhibition designer)
Can Elgiz (Founder of Elgiz Museum, collector)
T. Melih Görgün (Independent curator)
Ayda Elgiz Güreli (Founder member of Elgiz Museum, collector)
Billur Tansel (Independent curator)
Koray Tokdemir (Artist)
Gönül Nuhoğlu (The Painting and Sculpture Museums Association)
Derya Bigalı (Akbank Sanat Director)
Exhibition curators:
Zeynep Burçoğlu – Koray Tokdemir
Competition theme:
THERESHOLD
Reconstructing Meaning in Artistic Production
Shifting information and technology systems are reshaping daily habits, modes of thought, and relations to production. Large Language Models and data networks are now able to scan vast portions of humanity’s accumulated literature in seconds, selecting and reorganizing this material in response to our questions. In this process, our relationship to reality and meaning is being reconfigured as well.
Throughout history, radical transformations in production technologies and access to knowledge have required societies and individuals to renegotiate their positions in newly emerging contexts. Such ruptures have played a determining role in governance, settlement patterns and ways of living, artistic practices and structures, as well as destruction and warfare. The current transformation, marked by Large Language Models and artificial intelligence, has not yet settled fully in everyday life, yet it already foregrounds pressing questions: ‘Is it possible to produce without consciousness?’ ‘Does creativity still belong to the human?’ This shift, grounded in collective information networks, exceeds earlier technical and economic transformations. For the first time, it structurally calls into question the human’s indispensable role in knowledge production, interrupting the line of tradition and continuity long sustained through lived experience. Symbols, beliefs and narratives continue to circulate, but it has become increasingly difficult to discern how they will take shape and evolve under these conditions.
At the same time, the relationship between governance structures, power, and meaning is also being re-configured. Historically beliefs, ideologies and narratives have functioned as tools and discourses of power without ever fully determining individual lives. Rather they have operated by framing action, orienting decisions, and generating contexts of sense-making. Today, however, the function of these tools is gradually receding. Meaning no longer appears as a stable reference that directs decisions; instead, it emerges as a constantly reconstructed surface that circumscribes them.
The exhibition is positioned in this threshold, where the established bonds between contemporary production practices, meaning, and human experience are undergoing transformation. It invites artists to engage emerging contexts through their own modes of production and to collectively examine how meaning is formed, how it has shifted, and under what conditions it reappears today.
Zeynep Burçoğlu – Koray Tokdemir