© 2012 | amberTXT / BIS ISBN 978-605-88807-7-1

in İstanbul. Therefore it is more often now
that we will see single new media works
as part of contemporary art exhibitions in
the galleries. I prefer to say art market because
the art has been almost totally left
or given to the private sector; the state is
not a real actor in this scene any more in
Turkey.
Indeed outside of the early Republican
period when the major art schools were
founded the state never has never really
supported art in Turkey. It was in fact
the opposite. It was only in the year 2010,
when İstanbul was the European Capital
of Culture that independent artists and
organizations working in contemporary
art field were supported by the state for
the first time through the İstanbul 2010
ECC Agency. That experience also showed
us that no practice or procedure through
which artists and the state can work together,
had been developed. Today you
can imagine an art scene in which almost
all big national corporates have their own
cultural institutions, there are only commercial
galleries, only a small audience
which is not enough to make the only
contemporary performance theatre of
İstanbul (garajistanbul) survive, and no
city or state support except the traditional
arts or cinema.
Therefore, the corporations and collectors
started to lead the art scene. Since
the mainstream markets react slower
to the changes of the time and Turkey is
only a follower of Western art scene, what
we managed to get is a conventional art
market at the end. This can be also true
for many other countries these days; less
state money for arts and whatever is available
mostly goes to traditional or conventional
arts. But the lack of public money
in the art scene in Turkey makes it totally
open to the manipulation of the power
actors and in which artists, artist groups,
independent institutions, etc. are in the
danger of losing their voice. This actually
explains the choice of amberPlatform’s
theme around the concept of Commons
for this year in 2012.
In such an art scene, it is difficult to find her
way as an artist, especially if you are working
in a niche. As I mentioned before there
are only a few artist in Turkey who could
have developed a career in new media.
Ebru Kurbak lives and works in Vienna.
After completing her graduate and MA in
architecture, she thought at Bilgi university
VCD department, later she moved to
Austria for her PhD study. Ebru Kurbak
became known especially with their collaborative
work with Mahir Yavuz, titled
News Knitter, they created pullovers that
visualize large scale data; specifically
news about the Turkish military. It is
partly a political work that consists of
data collected through the Google search
in a certain time scale and processed with
custom software to create the visualization.
Kurbak intersted in wearables and
continue creating wearable artworks.
Mahir Yavuz also studied and thought at
Bilgi University's VCD Department before
moving to Linz for his PhD. He workes on
information visuzalization and created
many infiviz in the frame of artistic representations.
He is currently working in
New York as a designer an also producing
artworks in the same channel.
Burak Arıkan is the best-known Turkish
media artist. He studied at MIT after his
civic engineering education and master’s
degree in media design in Turkey. He is
the most productive artist in the field.
During his education at MIT he worked
on different topics and collaborated with
55