Book Club: Books That Spark Thinking on Production
Book: Five Cities - Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
Time: 18:30 - 19:45
Speaker: Burçak Bingöl
Moderator: Esra Ece Kuleci
In this gathering, together with Burçak Bingöl, we turn our focus particularly to Istanbul, taking Tanpınar’s Five Cities as our point of departure. Going beyond Five Cities alone, we consider Tanpınar’s aesthetic, historical, and emotional relationship with the city through his other writings as well, and discuss how individual memory, collective memory, and urban memory nourish processes of production.
We will reflect on how Istanbul’s layered structure opens up a field of inspiration in Tanpınar’s world, how this legacy resonates within Burçak Bingöl’s own artistic practice, and how the artist draws nourishment from the city, from texts, and from memory.
Burçak Bingöl was born in 1976 in Görele and grew up in Ankara. She completed her doctoral-level fine arts education at Hacettepe University in 2008, studied music at the Ankara State Conservatory between 1985–91, and completed the Photography Program at The New School in New York in 2009. She has held solo exhibitions in New York, Ankara, Istanbul, Berlin, and at Tate St Ives, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Dialogues: Modern Artists and the Ottoman Past at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the 15th Istanbul Biennial, a good neighbour.
As a curator, she has organized four exhibitions in Ankara and Istanbul. She has participated in artist residency programs at Porthmeor Studios (Cornwall), IASPIS (Stockholm), Cité des Arts (Paris), Hunter College (New York), and Gate 27 (Ayvalık). Her works are included in major public collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), 21C Museum (Kentucky), Salsali Private Museum (Dubai), MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art (Krakow, Poland), Istanbul Modern, Odunpazarı Modern Museum (Eskişehir), and Baksı Museum (Bayburt), as well as in private collections across Turkey, Europe, the Americas, and the Middle and Far East.
She is a member of the Advisory Board of Hacettepe University Institute of Fine Arts. Through methods of copying, tracing, dismantling, and reconstructing, Bingöl designs new configurations and modes of relation using familiar forms of representation. Her practice, nourished by personal and cultural histories, generates new constructs in which material, object, and image are continuously disrupted and transformed into one another, creating a visual field of research that engages with space on conceptual, formal, and sensory levels. She lives and works in Beyoğlu, Istanbul.
* The event will take place at Frankeştayn Kitabevi.
Address: Hacımimi, Lüleci Hendek Cd. 16/A, 34425 Beyoğlu/İstanbul
* To participate in this talk, you can register via the “Register” button on the event page and obtain your free invitation. Registrations will open five days before the event (on June 16, 2026, at 18:30), at which time the “Register” button will become visible. Participation is free and limited to 50 attendees.