"Curating Contemporary Art" Seminar Program
Seminar: The Atlas Project: Excerpts from a Curatorial Research
Speaker: Basak Senova
Time: 6:00-7:30 pm
In this seminar, Başak Şenova will talk about an ongoing curatorial research process and provide detailed explanations. The Atlas (of Creative Mechanisms): [Curating–Conducting] is an artistic research project that explores the comparative analysis between curatorial and conducting practices. This project aims to discover new ways of perceiving creative mechanisms through contemporary art exhibitions and concert music held after 2000. It aims to open new paths in artistic research by examining the performative, interactive and implicit dimensions of both practices.
The content and results produced by the project include an ongoing Event Series, the online platform The Atlas Online planned to open in September 2025, Dialogical Performances events, The Atlas Exhibition to be held in Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna in June 2025, and a final publication to be published in 2026/2027. Şenova will comprehensively explain and exemplify these contents and results.
Basak Senova is a curator and designer (MFA in Graphic Design and Ph.D. in Art, Design, and Architecture) who has been writing on art, technology, and media, initiating and developing projects, and curating exhibitions since 1995. Senova is the Turkish correspondent of Flash Art International and a member of the editorial board of PASS, International Biennial Association’s (IBA) journal, and a corresponding member of the Secession. Senova acted as an advisory board member of the Turkish Pavilion at Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, and the Biennial of Contemporary Art, D-0 ARK Underground in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Senova curated the Turkey and Republic of Macedonia pavilions at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and 2015. She co-curated the UNCOVERED project (Cyprus, 2011-2013) and the 2nd and 5th Biennial of Contemporary Art, D-O ARK Underground (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2013 and 2019). She acted as the Art Gallery Chair of (ACM) SIGGRAPH 2014 (Vancouver), the curator of the Helsinki Photography Biennial 2014, and the Jerusalem Show VII: Fractures (2014). In 2016, she curated the Lines of Passage (in medias res) Exhibition in Lesvos, and in 2019, the inaugural exhibition of B7L9, Climbing Through the Tide, in Tunis. Between 2017-2019, she worked on CrossSections, a research/process-based art project, and curated five groups and three solo exhibitions in the project context in Vienna, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Rome in 2018 and 2019. In 2022, she concluded the Octopus Programme with two exhibitions in Tunis and Vienna. Currently, she holds a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher position at the University of Applied Arts Vienna with her PEEK project, Atlas (of Creative Mechanisms): [Curating-Conducting], awarded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
* To learn conditions of participation in a single seminar, we would kindly ask you to send an e-mail to apply@curatingcontemporaryart.org address noting the required seminar details. Single seminar participation fee is 650 TL.