Bulletin #19. Flow Out

Bulletin #19. Flow Out

by Collective Çukurcuma, Funa Ye and the Istanbul Queer Art Collective
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Collective Çukurcuma included video works of Funa Ye and the Istanbul Queer Art Collective as part of the FLOW OUT exhibition, hosted by Bilsart, Istanbul until June 30, 2019. The program is based on the common practice of thinking, expressing and writing collectively about the present. As co-authors, they continued to write the collective essay through email exchanges — no one is the owner of the piece, whereas each of them is a participant. FLOW OUT does not belong to a place, but it refers to contemporaneity, addressing the problem of authorship in a collaboration, and experimenting with the idea of thinking and producing together.
 

About the authors:

Collective Çukurcuma is a non-profit curatorial collective from Istanbul, Turkey. It was founded by Naz Cuguoğlu and Mine Kaplangı in 2015 and joined by Serhat Cacekli in 2017. The collective mainly focuses on collaborative thinking and creating processes through its reading group meetings and cross-national collaborative exhibitions, and highlights the potential of trans-disciplinary collaborations within contemporary art, process-based rather than outcome-based research with an experimental laboratory approach through their curatorial and editorial projects. Founded in response to a need for building a platform generating progressive dialogues and discussions on contemporary art, it aims to rebuild the nearly-forgotten «neighbor» experience among artists, curators, researchers and collectives through forming collaborations locally and internationally. Collective Çukurcuma organizes periodical seminars, exhibitions, talks and performances, and also with their reading group project the research processes of their exhibitions are shared with artists and other participants. The reading group’s archive is open to all and can be accessed from the collective’s website.

Istanbul Queer Art Collective (IQAC) was founded in 2012 with the aim of focusing on queer performance art and a flexible structure open to collaboration. The collective has since been engaged in the ongoing project of remaking Fluxus performances by «queerifying» them. IQAC firmly believes in what Jack Halberstam calls the «queer art of failure», and embraces what Renate Lorenz calls «radical drag». The collective, currently comprised of the two founding artists Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul, is based in London. IQAC has performed and exhibited at various art events around the world, among which are: House of Wisdom Exhibition in Berlin, Amsterdam, Istanbul and Nottingham; Queer Future Exhibition, If Independent Film Festival, and Mamut Art Fair in Istanbul; Athens Sound Acts Festival in Greece; Zürcher Theatre Spektakel and Les Belles de Nuit Festival in Switzerland; and Deep Trash, Queer Migrant Takeover and NSA: Queer Salon in London.

Funa Ye was born in Kunming, China in 1986. She graduated with a BFA in Experimental Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and an MFA from the Central Saint Martins College of Art, London. Her practice is concerned with the relationship between the realities of everyday life. She is interested in the perceived connection between authority and many areas of social life such as different power structures, ethnic groups, and the fictional space of propaganda for the concept of «perfection» in an ideological system and utopian landscape. Her work is politically charged, subtly engaged in pastiche as a satirizing style of propaganda. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions, including: Curated Nail Residency, MoCA Pavilion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2015); People’s Congress via their Nails-Exhibitionist’s Curated Nails, Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts, Nanjing, China; Zha Golden Flowers—News from Nowhere, V Art Center, Shanghai (2014); and Galerie Pièce Unique, Paris (2014). Her recent solo exhibitions took place at Longmont Art Projects in Hong Kong (Selfiction, 2018) and at Nottingham Contemporary (From Hand to Hand, 2018). She currently lives and teaches at the Department of Experimental Art of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.