Abstractions, Intimations, Ruminations: Session #4

Duygu Demir will present her recent exhibition, of the same title, which looks at significant social, political, and ideological shifts that have caused seismic transformations both for Turkey and on a global scale over the course of the last 10 years. The terms ‘abstraction,’ ‘intimation,’ and ‘rumination’ in the title indicate the various individual and interwoven strategies that artists employ while doing this. These methods also reveal the shifts in the vocabulary of artmaking as it has adjusted its ways over the past decade in Turkey. In this context, ‘abstraction’ becomes a survival tactic rather than the reductionism or neutralization of the worldly as it has often been blamed for doing so in art historical narratives of the 20th century. ‘Intimation,’ on the other hand, suggests the clever invisibility of the visible, while 'rumination,' serves as the subtle yet impactful incision of both the artists and the curator.

Duygu Demir is an art historian and curator with a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology that focused on modern painting in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. Before her graduate studies, she worked as a programmer at SALT in Istanbul. Her curatorial work focuses on contemporary artistic practice, especially of the non-western kind. She curated exhibitions at MIT’s Keller Gallery (Cambridge, MA), Arter (Istanbul) and Tate Modern (London), as well as for SALT (Ankara and Istanbul). She is the editor of three monographic books on artists from Turkey, namely İsmail Saray, Cevdet Erek and the late Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin. Demir’s research topics and academic writing revolve around exhibition histories, transnational encounters, and moments of confluence between art and architecture. She recently joined NYU Abu Dhabi as the curator of the NYUAD Art Gallery as well as research assistant professor in Arts and Humanities. She has a combined BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Columbia University in New York.