Digital Twin / Tarabya, interactive 3d environment, 2020 ongoing
9 images 
The 3d environment rebuilds the German embassy ground in Tarabya, Istanbul that is currently used as a residence for artists based in Germany. Started during the pandemic, the interactive model aimed to respond to the situation in isolation and to attempt a virtual escape. It turns into a phantom-like doppelganger addressing Tarabya’s colonial history and present, its relationship to the current city, its borders, as well as its potentials.
The digital model can be visited and explored through an avatar, similar to a computer game. It is open source and accessible online and it will keep on evolving. In the current state, it includes contributions by ten artists, activists, and cultural workers based in Turkey. Visitors are invited to move through the environment and intervene while sketching, commenting, or placing objects.
The collective work takes place at the intersection of art, architecture, and activism, as it reflects how practices, institutions, histories, and the present materialize in the (built) environment. The residence in Tarabya is a particularly interesting place, behind a wall in an affluent neighborhood, with a well-tended garden adjoined by a forest. The wooden buildings are bright white showing traces of political conflicts, eclectic architecture, and ornamentation from colonial times, overlapping with current representational and security requirements of an embassy site. In the past, all major European colonial powers had residences in Tarabya. Today, Erdogan owns a heavily secured summer palace nearby. The view of the Bosporus disrupts this context aesthetically as well as logistically.
Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin
September 3 – October 31 2021
Series of c-prints, research, text, 2015/2021
7 images 
A clone of modernish Californian architecture: subdivided into multiple sandy volumes, decorated with large and long white studio windows, a pergola, palm trees, banana plants and the American flag. The building is a suburban home of the Internet: a cable landing point in technical terminology. It houses ‘critical infrastructure,’ those fibre optic cables of which Google has already quietly purchased 102.362 km to build up and out its very own internet of tomorrow. As one of many dispersed ‘fibre huts’* this house embodies above ground what actually sits below: 1.126.540 km of submarine cables networked into a contemporary version of the Roman road system (Lovink, 2019). While Google concentrates on South America with the cables, it aims at Africa with its balloons…
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Biennale di Venezia 2021, Austrian Pavilion
Art Center Los Angeles, 2015
With the support of Art Center Los Angeles / MDP.
Team: Nick Meehan, Selwa Sweidan, Erika Katrina Barbosa, Zhihan Ying
Conceptual framework and curation, 2019
17 images
The Sinop Biennial is based on situated practices and collaborative processes. It finds a starting point at the former market place “Hal” in the center of Sinop, the northernmost coastal city of Turkey, to explore various localities in the Anatolian Black Sea region. Moving on collective routes, the aim is to gather diverse histories, experiences, and artistic inquiries in situ: in the local geo- and socio-political realities, the Black Sea’s archival and colonized landforms and body of water. They pass over nation states and contain fragments from the past and future; the memory of a Russian spy whale from Cold War times, as well as perfectly intact ancient ships deep down in the dark sea together with tons of plastics. They are the site of particular relations and rites, of acts of political resistance and historical persistence; of changing infrastructures and movements from those who left and those who arrived—deliberately or not.
The place is also shaped by national mythologies and suppressed histories. They call for a politics of location. Formulated by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), a politics of location aims to reconnect thinking and speaking with a situated experience, a particularity, a geography, a body. It aims to reconnect what has been disconnected: politics to ongoing lives, claims to the ground they are coming from, to places, times, cultures, conditions, classes, and movements. Translated into the curatorial concept, in situ processes, that is situated practices, become important; on the one hand, these practices are opposed to the masculine that coincides with the fixity of objects or finished works just dropped and presented in a place and dwelling on stable differences between roles, subjects, and hierarchies. On the other hand, situated practices are opposed to a notion of locality as the site of foundational knowledge and fixed identity. Rather, they understand location as the place of experienced connections and intersections—through routes rather than roots, that means through the beings and things that pass by, stop, stay or leave. Therefore, situated practices engage in relations, they look at historical contact to recognize change and becoming through a series of encounters, contacts, and conflicts, on routes that enable and discipline the movement and displacement of beings and things.
Routes to follow at the Black Sea are: the Danube downstream into the Black Sea, Diogenes’ mythical travel from his hometown Sinop to Athens, the beltway connecting the six neighbors around the coast, the flows of oil, trash, data, swarms and pheromones from the Bosporus; to follow some of these routes might help us understand location as the relationship between things and beings.
While the biennial establishes contact zones on various routes, it is concerned with the potentials of discrepant movement, with tactics of translation and transgression, with encounters as political and aesthetic impulse. It aims to initiate active contacts and processes, establish collective practices between residents, guests, and (sub)urban region; it aims at art being produced rather than placed there, through transversal processes of conversation, translation and improvisation. We search for possible other and emancipated ways of connecting to things and beings, of recognizing and collectively producing alternative forms of knowledge with guests, the local environment and its inhabitants (animals, humans, plants, technology).
To move these forms of knowledge from the Black Sea Coast to Istanbul and other places, we produced an open and nomadic archive. There, the situated practices and collaborative processes will be continued and shared.
Conceptual framework by Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall
With contributions by Mobile Albania, Halil Altındere, Aristide Antonas, The Dynamic Archive, Elina Axioti, Mehtap Baydu, Banu Cennetoğlu, Övül Durmuşoğlu, Fulya Erdemci, Annika Eriksson, Hayırlı Evlat, Ana Filipovic, Marina Fokidis, Kevser Güler, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Philipp Mecke, Angela Melitopoulos, Mahir Namur, Samuel Nyholm, Pınar Öğrenci, Kemal Özen, Şener Özmen, theater.prekariat, For the Love of Bee! Collective, Kerstin Schroedinger, Hito Steyerl, Johannes Vogl, Sheri Wills, Brian Kuan Wood, Adnan Yıldız, Sibel Yılmazer, and others.
All photos by Laura Baumann.
Hal and Buzhane, Sinop
Mars, Istanbul
August 16—September 15, 2019
Research, spatial installation, video, 2016 10 images 
The installation forms a (dance) space within the (museum) space, including video screens telling about the history of the “köçek.” The “queer boy” was a dancer, at the same time a slave and coveted star, of a courtly culture of pre-modern Islamic societies, in which more gender forms existed than allowed by the European masculine-feminine binary. The köçek performed mostly for male audiences and used various elements of self-design, including long, tiered skirts, tinsel, colorful silks, jewelry, and makeup. Colonial travelers identified the köçek as an effeminate, morally offensive (but desirable) figure of the deviant Orient. With modernization in the Tanzimat Reform (1839-1876), Ottoman civil and religious authorities adopted the Western heteronormative position and enforced strict censorship against the köçek, continuing today in homophobic policies.
The installation was accompanied by weekly DJ sets and invited all visitors and staff into a queer environment – to dance, that is, to mobilize our politically passive bodies.
There exist various words for “dance” in Turkish.
oynamak — to play, act, dance
raks etmek — (from Arab raḳṣ) to dance
dans etmek — (from French danser) to dance
göbek atmak — lit. to throw stomach, to belly dance
kivirtmak — lit. to fold, dance sensuously
These words come as metonymy, ready-made, reimport, or as hybrid, mixing Arabic, Persian, or French with Ottoman languages. If they constituted an index, it would refer to a volume of ambiguous performative practices, of temporary spaces and designs in precolonial Islamic cultures, recorded through festival literature as well as through travelogues.
If these words for dance constituted a provocation, it would ask for what is it between the subject who dances and the subject who rules?
To address this question, the figure of the köçek, a professional young male dancer, performing to mostly male audiences at the Ottoman court from the 16th to the 19th century, might establish a historical link. Often times recruited or even kidnapped from the non-Islamic population of Greeks, Jews, Roma, or Armenians the young dancer would start a six-year long education, including playing accompanying instruments. As long as he was “moon-faced,” the köçek was to perform and use diverse elements of costume and self-design, including long, tiered skirts or loose pants (şalvar), shimmies, colorful silks, jewelry, make up, and long hair, to enhance his beauty. We say his beauty, but we know that in both, old and modern Turkish there exists no gender-specific pronoun.
This “queer boy” was a part of precolonial Islamic cultures that tolerated ambiguous (even contradicting) social and cultural forms; above all, more gender forms and also with different temporalities than the masculine-feminine binary of European human design. Perceived as “normal” in Ottoman culture, the köçek appeared shockingly deviant to European observers. To both he obviously was desirable:
Traveling to Constantinople in 1810, John Cam Hobhouse reports: „… here I saw a boy dancing in a style indescribably beastly, scarcely moving from one place, but making a thousand lascivious motions with his thighs loins and belly.“ Two days later he brought Lord Byron to see the performance.
In the first part of his improvised performances, the köçek would move to slow music using a veil or a shawl. The second part would be livelier, and the dancer would employ wooden clappers, shimmies of his shoulders and hips, and involve sexually explicit movements. He would mime stories to elaborate his songs, and sometimes he would include skilled athleticism, acrobatics, and mimicry.
If the köçek was appreciated as an artist, he was above all an object of desire and sexual attraction, and a subject of sexual services. His performances caused rampage among audiences and even murders—murders out of jealousy, not because of issues with sexuality. Sexuality, as a concept designed to discriminate all sexual activities between homo or hetero was simply not existing in pre-colonial Islamic societies. It was only introduced through European colonial modernization.
Importing their set of gender and sexual scripts to the Islamic world, European observers would describe the köçek as effeminate or cross–dressed, even though he had his own unique style, neither male nor female. Ultimately, the köçek was re-designed according to European norms of gender and sexuality: He became a “homosexual”, morally offensive figure of the deviant Orient. During modernization, in the Tanzimat reform era (1839-1876), both Ottoman civil and religious authorities adopted the Western position, renounced the köçek for lascivious behavior and enforced censorship policies.
Alt Art Space, Istanbul Design Biennial, 2016
Model, acryl glass, stones, miniature plant, foam pump, 2018
5 images 
From a series of fragmentary works and speculative research on feminist spatial utopias: The acryl glass object is a model and a mechanism at the same time; it portrays the Self-Cleaning House (Frances Gabe, 1984) and provides a tool to douche itself. The drawings show two completely (inside and outside) tiled houses unfolded, as well as a pattern of a zeppelin.
The original self-cleaning house that the American inventor also inhabited, implies questions about the role of technology in dismantling patriarchic formations, not so much as it aims at liberating the (female) homeworker, but rather as it gives an idea of women’s role in technological development. Contradicting the assumed rational and objective male space that integrates technology with prevailing structures of power, Frances Gabe’s house was a space where she felt safe and assured to engineer, learn, and experiment.
The project by Frances Gabe is a patented invention (patent number: 4428085) that consists of sixty-eight appliances to make the house clean and dry itself. By pressing a button, sprinklers in the ceiling of each room are activated, to clean the room with detergent and water followed by hot air drying. The building construction does not only clean the house but also clothes, dishes and even the dog house. The “giant dishwasher”, eliminates (mainly) women’s reproductive labor and unpaid housework, in a completing of the Frankfurt kitchen concept.
50 Years after 50 Years of the Bauhaus
Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart
May 4—September 23, 2018
Installation, cardboard, tape, kitchen paper, 2019
4 images 
As part of a series of fragmentary works and speculative research on feminist spatial utopias “n minus 1” responds to the Kitchenless House (1915) by architect Alice Constance Austin. By exploring the process of subtraction (apartment minus kitchen), the aim is to activate emancipatory ideas and practices that might help reshape our shared spaces.
The installation alludes to a space opening up in between pillars in a floor plan where the kitchen is removed from the center. Instead, a fluid zone is produced blurring the borders between inside and outside and questioning fixed functions, conventions and usages. Perhaps the neighbors will pass through from time to time.
Exploring various situations and scenes that subtract from a given set of rooms, actors, and functions, the research is occupied with minor operations (Deleuze) that test aesthetic and political alternatives to modernist ideologies, based on the premise of endless growth.
Modernism has long been questioned for its grandios utopian aspirations regarded as bound up with paternalistic, colonial, and totalitarian attitudes. The n minus 1 drafts formulate not modernist major projects but concepts of minor operations that however allow for new spatial connections and relations. In that they provide the ground on which we might evolve more open social, political, and aesthetic forms of living together.
Kunsthalle Lingen
June 7—August 25, 2019
Installation, MDF, tee glasses, prints, text, video 2018
8 images 
The model fragment results from a long-term research into (anti-)utopian projects that, informed by feminist theories and practices, have reimagined modern (domestic) space. It is part of a collection and speculation on houses and scenes that subtract from a given set of rooms, actors, and functions: these speculations remove the kitchen from the apartment, Romeo from Romeo and Juliet, the state from democracy, the patriarchy from almost any formation. Following a method of subtraction (n minus 1), they aim at a methodological activation of emancipatory ideas and practices to reshape our shared spaces.
Modernism has long been questioned for its grandios utopian aspirations regarded as bound up with paternalistic, colonial, and totalitarian attitudes. The n-1 drafts formulate not modernist major projects but concepts of minor operations that however allow for new spatial connections and relations. In that they provide the ground on which we might evolve more open social, political, and aesthetic forms of living together.
The House Alice Built responds to the Kitchenless House (1915) by architect Alice Constance Austin: a residential building that was designed without a kitchen for a socialist community in California at the beginning of the 20th century. The architect eliminated the kitchen from the private dwelling, in order to communalize it. A central kitchen, serving the whole community, should instead be operated through paid professionals. The intention was to change not just the life of women and their situation of unpaid and invisible housework but also to question the social relations between the community members and their environment. The house was never fully realized, and the community existed only between 1913 and 17.
Speculative research and production, various media, 2018
5 images 
excerpt of the lexicon
The installation explores currents of thought and practice—from 1918 to 2018 by way of 1968—that have produced alternative futures through a feminist perspective: architectural projections and speculations, utopian ideas and visions are introduced and discussed in a moment of political and social regression. Reacting to the ideological implications and effects of modernism, these works produce concepts for new material, social, political and aesthetic spaces.
Among others, the lexicon includes Shulamith Firestone, Alice B. Toklas, Maria Telkes, Eleanor Raymond, Marlene Moeschke-Poelzig, Alison Smithson, Alice Constance Austin, Frances Gabe, Varvara Stepanova, Janelle Monáe, etc. In terms of structure, the lexicon is developed as an open and growing archive that can go from a word to a phrase, from a drawing to a floor plan, from a video to a model, from an argument to an entire text.
If a short text by Walter Benjamin introduces the destructive character (1931) as the (modern) activity of clearing away, of making room—in need for fresh air and open space—it seems to read back a Bauhaus program. Through complete reduction, thereby deleting the traces of its age and rooting out of its own condition, the destructive character obtains the potential for a new beginning. The zero point, a tabula rasa of form, allowed to start anew, to produce neutral, ultimately cleared spaces that could even impede leaving traces, as Benjamin noted in reference to glass architecture.
Once combined with a (structural) grid, glass architecture could actually deliver fresh air and open space—at any scale, be it furniture, a pavilion, school, skyscraper, or a city. The generic and radically rational nature implied in the grid system with glass surface is explored by Ludwig Hilberseimer’s project for a Hochhausstadt (1924) organizing a city of three million inhabitants upon a calculation of one square window per person. In 1933, when the Gestapo accused the German architect and planner as “problematically left-wing”, Hilberseimer emigrated to the U.S. where he started teaching in collaboration with Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Simultaneously, Walter Gropius was heading the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge. Both became those heroic figures, made in the U.S., that allowed for the consolidation (commodification) of Bauhaus modernism and its reimport to Europe.
From the U.S. Bauhaus returned not just as a style, a new tradition that allowed for the identification with a free and democratic, capitalist West against a Communist East, Bauhaus also signified a spatial matrix of recycled military technologies through which expanding capitalism could advance globally after the Second World War. Thus, it helped shaping a techno-political postwar space that was paradoxically exposed to the threat of complete destruction through a new global war.
With some impact, the radical architecture and neo-avantgarde movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as so-called postmodern tendencies confronted classical modernism. Yet, architecture and the production of space as a mode of social and political engagement with a feminist agenda has remained almost invisible. Therefore, the installation aims at making room for a fragmentary collection and production of videos, plans, images, and models of feminist visions, as possible other ways of imagining how to live together.
50 Years after 50 Years of the Bauhaus
Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart
May 4—September 23, 2018
Schluss mit reden, spielen wir!
Kunsthalle Lingen
June 7—August 25, 2019
Concept and spatial intervention for a travelling art space, 2018
12 images 
video on the boat
To think of a ship as an exhibition space on the move means to imagine it as active: not so much an art container that can be visited, but rather itself an act of visiting. A ship approaches different sites as a guest or intruder, as a temporary neighbor in different localities, in urban or rural places, in dense or more scattered areas. It questions static institutional thinking, fixed spatial settings and organizational infrastructures, as well as the idea of an unchangeable public.
The 1960s East German excursion ship is turned into a mobile space for exhibitions, workshops, and various other interdisciplinary events. Travelling on the waterways through European places, it addresses the existing relations between water and land, center and periphery, as well as conventions and practices in different spheres of art, life, and education. The subtractive alterations transform the ship interior into an open hall with windows in two rows and a curtain.
If the ship can be described as a placeless place, it is, more than that, an active infrastructure connecting and confronting things, beings, and ideas, colonial history with a colonial present, one-day excursions with flight; relations of power and exploitation, but also of desire and imagination.
Arguably, the ship forges other forms of exhibiting and coming together with things and beings, as it gets into various contacts, enables and calls for new collective processes and different forms of making and perceiving things. As a floating space without fixed ground, the ship is set up to allow for encounters as political and aesthetic impulse. This impulse is decidedly feminist, as the name Dauerwelle already implies.
Commissioned by Hochschule für Künste Bremen.
Spatial intervention, printed carpets, audio installation, 2017
8 images 
The installation includes carpets printed with satellite images of various temporary cities, as well as documents, books and sound on their material forms, politics, sociologies, economies, and aesthetics. These heterogeneous urban forms are spread across the globe, but are all characterized by ephemerality. On the carpets they are related and confronted: a refuge with a festival, a market with a military camp. While these forms often share materials and structures, they exhibit the inequity that exists between the North and South, between citizens and non-citizens, between the Oktoberfest and Talad Rom Hoob, a railway market in Thailand.
The audio piece contracts field recordings from heterogeneous ephemeral urban phenomena taking place remotely but often simultaneously. Throughout one year, sounds from different temporary cities across the globe, a festival in Germany (Oktoberfest) and a celebration in India (Kumbh Mela), overlap with noise from a railway market in Thailand (Talad Rom Hoob), a military camp in Afghanistan (FOB Lightning), and an extraction site in Chile (Chuquicamata) etc.
Two books in the installation:
The books of festivals (Ottoman: Sūr-nāme) were written and drawn to give detailed account on the Ottoman festivals that were famously lasting 40 days and 40 nights. These illustrated albums recount the celebrations in the Ottoman Empire from Renaissance time to the 19th century. They include the temporal order of processions, grand entrance of the Sultan, feasts, entertainers, musicians, dancers, gift giving, firework displays, circumcision and wedding ceremonies. They also contain information about the ephemeral elements that were developed by architects to serve the festival and spectacle. In 1582, Ottoman architects designed a moving vehicle which was carrying a blooding hand and foot separated from its body. Also in that year, architect Ibrahim Efendi designed performances on ropes over the Golden Horn, the waterway inlet of the Bosphorus and thus turned the event into an acrobatic show.
In his media theory French philosopher Régis Debray retells the story of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt as the invention of the portable God. As a wanderer, Israel could not offer an altar or a statue to their God. Following Debray, they therefore declared these heavy objects as anyway forbidden. Instead, the Israelites developed light-weight objects like the tefillin, mini leather boxes containing scrolls of torah verses, to be read through magnifying glasses. In a materialist interpretation Debray asserts that these religious devices not only allowed transportation but also meant transformation: Transmission is not a simple transfer from a sender to a receiver, but “a chain of incessant transformations”. In these transformations “sender and receiver are modified from the inside by the message they exchange, and the message is itself modified by its circulation. He concludes: In transit, the Judaic God became a-topical, but accessible at any place and time. If we look at social media, digital market places, or online games today, all of them constituting sort of ephemeral cities, we might ask with Debray: in what ways do they transform the city as we know it?
Does Permanence Matter?
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich 2017
Object on castors, 2017
5 images 
Walter Benjamin asserts the importance of material presence to understand the city. In The Arcades Project, he includes direct quotations from Siegfried Giedion’s early work Construction in France to describe a modern iron and steel architecture, railroad stations, exhibition halls, winter gardens and department stores. However, by focusing on all kinds of decorative features in and around buildings, Benjamin goes beyond Sigfried Giedion’s purist (placeless and timeless) modernism. He recognizes in the ephemeral elements “material of vital importance for us … In any case, material of vital importance politically; this is demonstrated by the attachment of the Surrealists to these things, as much as by their exploitation in contemporary fashion.“
The spatial elements that emerge within ephemeral urbanism: stalls, draperies, and decorations, as well as containers, tents, and fences, collapse ‘cities of dream,’ to use Benjamin’s notion, with cities of painful actuality exhibiting the political, social, economic, and environmental disparity of our world.
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 2017
Installation, various media, 2015
12 images 
excerpt from video
‘Natural Wifi’ explores the material culture of the Internet to chart the shifted social relationships towards ‘Natural Wifi’ explores the material culture of the Internet to chart the shifted social relationships towards technology, ‘nature’ and between us. Through the lens of Los Angeles’ evolving techno-landscape it looks for nature’s synthetic and symbolic presence within our digital and physical spaces. The artificiality of ‘nature’ and the naturalness of technology are reflected in urban as well as private spaces, in how we relate to others.
The installation brings together various media and objects that show cosmetic or camouflage efforts to hide technological devices in the Californian area: cell tower concealments in the form of fake palm trees, cacti, and conifers, or plastic stones and boulders commonly used to hide various technical and electric equipment. At the same time, the archive documents those signs that explicitly refer to the Internet’s material infrastructure, that is, fibre optic cables, buried underground and designated as “critical infrastructure” by Homeland Security.
We hear excerpts taken from an interview with a TaskRabbit employee, hired to talk about her work and exchange her experiences with the platform, the app, and employers.
With the support of Art Center Los Angeles / MDP.
Team: Nick Meehan, Selwa Sweidan, Erika Katrina Barbosa, Zhihan Ying
Art Center Los Angeles, 2015
Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, 2015
Biennale di Venezia, 2021
e-flux Brooklyn, 2022
Collaborative speculative research and production, various media, 2015
10 images 
Conceived as speculative research on the current city of Athens, Spuren spuren applies the concept of collecting and producing traces at the same time. With this in-between process, Mahall/Serbest, together with Adelheid Schulz, aim at recording as well as triggering events and interventions in the city. Two snakes, capital (crisis), beach huts, a desert, and Hölderlin traverse these events and challenge strict oppositions between subject and object, between origin and derivative. They help questioning whether traces can be linked to any origin at all. Can there be determined one source at all, and can localities be maintained in the age of the Internet, enabling complete medial connectedness and diffusion?
Spuren spuren is set up as an open working space. Besides a presentation within the exhibition-space the latter becomes a place of production, of an ongoing process. During the exhibition a travel agency is installed, Greek language courses are offered. A seminar on the golden ratio is taking place. The exhibition becomes an open space. Package holidays and Ouzo refer to Germany’s post-war period clichés concerning Greece. The inclusive situation is part confrontation with well-known preconceptions (especially intact during the crisis) while at the same time opportunity to get involved in conversations about the present.
Team: Wencong Li, Julia Zumkeller, Ioannis Michailidis, Sümeyye Yigit, Pavlina Zika, Lina Müller, Rafal Wójcik, Georgios Katsanos, Riin-Kärt Ranne, Anastasia Thanou, Katarzyna Wierzchnicka, Yuxuan Hu, Juliane Schwarz, Christos Antoniou, Philipp Schell, Billur Damla Üfler, Sarah Yaparsidi
With the help of Chrissi Nasz.
Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2015
Many thanks to Hans Christ, Keller Easterling, Marina Fokidis, Elina Axioti, Andreas Angelidakis, Aristide Antonas, Angelo Plessas, Evelyn Steiner.
Site-specific and speculative work, programming, workshops at Biennale die Venezia 2014
officeus.org
Through different media and formats, the collaborative work investigates architecture and the production of space as part of global, post capitalist culture.
The US Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia, Biennale di Venezia, 2014
This project was produced as part of OfficeUS, a project of the U.S. Pavilion, commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture, at the 2014 International Architecture Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia.
Junk Jet is a collaborative format set up to discuss speculative works across spatial, image, text, and social practices. Coming as irregular series of medial events, and a low-fi paper publication (including weird special gifts) on a non-commercial scale it is edited by Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall and published by themselves.
Excerpt of Junk Jet no. 3 Flux-Us-Flux-You
Junk Jet is interested in works and texts that tunnel those practices with obvious lack of any humor or fiction. It is about wild forms and found objects, about weird theories and (small) narratives, anti-fashions and non-styles, about exploring do-it-yourself works, accidental outcomes, deviant and normal aesthetic forms that result from jammed common practices, old media, and subverted customary tools. It is about cultivating an anti-heart by “introducing noise to signal”. Whereas n°1 experiments with the topic of failure, or better: noise, n°2 is especially into architectural and spatial works. The n°3 flux us! flux you! issue focuses on temporary types, on stable happenings and unstable thoughts: boogie buildings, rolling rocks, flying architectures, provisory pyramids, lifted cellars and dug in landmarks, curtains, mobiles, house boats, bubbles, zeppelins, flying saucers … The n°4 deals with making something out of nothing and contains works that move from mumbo-jumbo to real magic and back. Issue n°5 is an archive impossible with reflecting net.heart of internet culture. It transfers internet things from their digital space into a paper jet. n°6 here and where issue is all about local forms and spaces faced with a global culture.
Junk Jet has been exhibited at MOMA: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design Gallery; Contemporary Art Center La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Perloff Gallery, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Los Angeles; Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsquartier, Wien; Gallery Vie, Tokyo; Tokyo Art Book Fair; Osaka Art Book Fair; Shibaura House, Tokyo; Vancouver Art Gallery; HKW, Transmediale, Berlin; AA Architectural Association, London; New York Art Book Fair, etc. Solo exhibitions include shows at General Public, Berlin; Ausjunk, Stuttgart; and Vamos, New York.