"Curating Contemporary Art" Seminar Program
Seminar: Co-Action Device
Speaker: İnci Eviner
Time: 6:00-7:00 pm
Co-Action Device is a long-term project that seeks pedagogical and artistic responses to the loss and destruction caused by political tensions and social ruptures. It understands art, education, and practices of thinking together as a shared transformative field. The project emerged in response to a desire to explore the “possibilities of being together ,driven by the Gezi Park protests in 2013. Co-Action Device: A Study was realized during the 13th Istanbul Biennial through the performative research of forty students invited by İnci Eviner via an open call. Operating outside the ideological, bureaucratic, and restrictive structures of formal education, the project asked whether new forms of collaboration and participation, together with the expressive capacities of contemporary art, could give rise to a free social space, and examined the role of art in fostering a sense of collective responsibility. Through interdisciplinary interactions, chance encounters, and seminar-like workshops, Co-Action Device created a continuous and dynamic exchange between knowledge production and artistic practice, engaging with learning under conditions of urgency, provisional forms of knowledge, and disrupted academic languages. In 2017, in Utrecht, the project continued under the subtitle I Rather Laugh, placing friendship at its center through a methodology in which participants also acted as moderators, and pursuing new workshop formats and modes of knowledge and artistic practice. In 2022, Co-Action Device was reactivated in a site-specific form in Hasköy, Istanbul. Through artistic and performative research methods that brought together the area’s historical, social, and geographical layers with nature, sound, emotions, and narratives, the project addressed issues such as urban consciousness and social division, aiming to imagine the future through the diversity of everyday life experienced in the “here and now.”
About İnci Eviner
İnci Eviner graduated from the Painting Department of Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts and completed her PhD at the same university. She represented Turkey at the 58th Venice Biennale, Turkish Pavilion in 2019. She received the Sharjah Biennial Prize in 2017. Among Eviner’s solo exhibitions are Suspicious Compromises, Tophane-i Amire, Istanbul (2025); Neural Crest of an Island, Dirimart Pera, Istanbul (2024); Mécaniques de l’esprit, Maison de la Culture d’Amiens, Amiens (2024); Beyond Home, İMALAT-HANE, Bursa (2023); Houris and Travelers, Dirimart Dolapdere, Istanbul (2022); Co-Action Device: A Study, Hasköy, Istanbul (2022); Looping on Thin Ice, Pearl Lam Galleries, Shanghai (2016); Runaway Girls, Drawing Center, New York (2015); Broken Manifestos, Espace Chatelain, Brussels (2013); Broken Manifestos, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2011); Harem, Art in the Auditorium, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2009); and Nouveau Citoyen, MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine (2009). Recent group exhibitions and biennials in which she participated include Frieze Sculpture, London (2024); Further Away, 6th Mardin Biennial, Mardin (2024); Colonial Memory, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid (2024); Inspired by the East, British Museum, London (2020); Hand Drawn, Action Packed, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London (2018); Beautiful World, Where Are You?, 10th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2018); and Imagined Borders, 12th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2018). The artist has been invited to a number of artist residencies including Rauschenberg Foundation, Florida (2017); SAM Art Projects (2010) and Leube, Salzburg (2005). Eviner’s works have been included in international collections such as the Deutsche Bank Collection, Centre Pompidou Paris, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim New York and TBA21 Vienna. She lives and works in Istanbul.
* This seminar is organized in collaboration between Akbank Sanat and Open Dialogue Istanbul
* 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 850 TL for adults, 650 TL for students (VAT included).
* The program will take place on the online platform Zoom.