Kasa Gallery, in collaboration with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Westminster, and the MA in Media Studies at The New School has initiated an annual residency program for young artists from Turkey.
Launched in 2012 by Lanfranco Aceti, Kasa Gallery Director and Senior Curator, the residency program will continue to support one artist each year by offering the opportunity to use the gallery space as well as by providing mentoring, exhibition material and hosting a final solo show by the artist at the end of the residency period.
Kasa Gallery has received many applications from Turkish artists for its residency program for the summer 2012. After a careful review, Batu Bozoglu with his project Homework: “Make My Day” was selected as the winner.
Homework: “Make My Day” is a new Kasa Gallery commissioned art project part of the gallery’s commitment to create collaborative artworks. It is an interdisciplinary piece where the communication and sharing creates a disruption of the artist’s creative processes. Homework: “Make My Day” is about the artist’s disobedience and responses to the gallery’s interference with the artist’s creative processes. Make My Day as per the Oxford English Dictionary, is “used ironically to encourage or incite a person to an action that will justify violent or severe retribution on the part of the speaker (this being the speaker’s favoured course of action).”
Batu Bozoglu is gathering a series of personal responses to the gallery’s interference with his creative process. If contemporary social media invade every aspects of contemporary life, even artistic processes and production, Batu Bozoglu’s artworks focus on responding to the invasive and pervasive role of the gallery system and audience and are related to the significance and/or insignificance of daily actions and the role that social media interactions can play in shaping or disrupting artistic inspiration.
As in the case of Marina Abramovich’s Rhythm 0 (1974), Pin Body by Stelarc (1996), Double Game by Sophie Call (1998-2000), Ken Goldberg’s The Tele-Actor (2001), or Clifford Owens and his exhibition at MoMA PS1 (2005 – first enacted in 2004), the artist will let the gallery take charge and disrupt his creative processes. But these forms of disruption will generate consequences and the gallery’s actions could ‘make the artist’s day.’
As a ‘bad boy’ of the Istanbul art scene, Bozoglu, with his artworks, will challenge the tyranny of the gallery and of the audience. The artist from his disobedience and responses to the gallery has created a body of artworks using a variety of media ranging from painting to photography, video to installations.
The exhibition Homework: “Make My Day” by Batu Bozoğlu will be at Kasa Gallery between November 9 – December 14, 2012. The opening cocktail will be at Sabancı Üniversitesi Minerva Han hall on November 9, 2012 at 19:00.
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Artist’s Biography
Batu Bozoğlu
Born in 1983, Batu Bozoğlu graduated from the Painting Department in Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts. During his university studies, he has produced several acrylic paintings around the themes relating to the contradictions between concepts such as religion and technology, organic and mechanic. Upon his graduation, he started a collaborative project titled “Bobin Yayın Radio Project,” which was an online interactive radio program focusing on the issues of art production. Bobin Yayın was broadcast for eight months and met its audience in the exhibition Pist/Rezerve. The illustrated diary and notes which the artist kept during his military has become another ongoing project titled “Chronicles of an Insignificant Man.” Bozoğlu, based on his MA thesis “Life as a Practice of Art” in Sabancı University Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design program, started to transform everyday life events into an artwork. Bozoglu’s artworks transform mundane events in to video art, photographs, paintings and installations that create relational narrative contexts and dialogues between the various sets of artworks and with the audience.
