| xurban_collective | |
|---|---|
| Born | 2000 New York, İzmir, Istanbul |
| Nationality | Turkish |
| Field | Conceptual art |
Xurban collective (stylized as xurban_collective) is an independent international art collective founded in 2000. xurban_collective has members located in İzmir, Istanbul and New York City. Core members of the group are Guven Incirlioglu and Hakan Topal, whose transatlantic collaborations take the form of media projects and installations. xurban_collective's mission is to instigate the questioning, examination, and discussion of contemporary politics, theory, and ideology, utilizing documentary photography, video, new media technologies and text. The collective focuses specifically on areas of regional conflicts, military spatial confinement, urban segregation and neoliberal exclusion strategies.[1]
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Guven Incirligioglu studied architecture (B.Arch); photography (MFA) and art theory (Ph.D.) and has exhibited since the 1980s in group shows and has held one person exhibitions in New York, Ankara, Istanbul, Sarajevo, Sofia and other locations working mostly with photography, photo-mechanical materials and new media. Since 1990, he was a lecturer in art and design in various schools in Turkey, including Bilkent University, Ankara, and Istanbul Bilgi University and is currently a faculty member at Economy University's Faculty of Art and Design in Izmir.
Hakan Topal is an artist and designer living and working in New York. He is the principal of SoHo, NY based design firm, Newgray and teaching at the Department of Media Culture, City University of New York. He studied engineering (B.S.), gender and women studies (M.A.) at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara and sociology of art and urban sociology (M.A. - Ph.D./abd) at the New School For Social Research, New York. Topal has had one-person exhibitions, performances and video projects in addition to publishing works in various international journals and catalogs. He worked as a researcher at Audio Visual Research Center at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and New Media Projects Manager at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Most recently, he was the guest editor of ArteEast Quarterly Journal and finished a documentary film project on a major late 18th-century Austro-Bavarian sculptor, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, commissioned by Neue Galerie New York.
Current collaborator include designer Mahir Yavuz, past collaborators include Ali Demirel, Mehmet Ali Uzelgun, Atif Akin, Elif Aksit, Akin Gulseven, Jillian McDonald and Bulent Ozturk.
xurban_collective exhibited internationally including projects in institutions such as the 49th Venice Biennial (2001), the 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003), PS1/MoMA (2005), Apexart (2004),[2] Exitart (2005) and ZKM – Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2004). xurban_collective participated in the "Political/Minamal" show curated by Klaus Biesenbach (MoMA, New York).[3] Most recently, xurban_collective is exbitited at TBA21-Vienna (2010), The National Contemporary Art Museum, Athens (2010) and Arter-Istanbul (2011).