November 22, 2024

Curators

ALPER TURAN

Alper Turan is a freelance curator, writer, and researcher. His practice and research draw from transnational queer strategies, global HIV/AIDS narratives, undetectable aesthetics, and the convergences of text, body, and image. He was a 2023-24 curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the 2023-24 General Idea Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. He serves as an adjunct curator at Protocinema and is a founding member of the Berlin-based organization STRÜKTÜR. Turan is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at the University of Toronto. His writings have appeared in publications such as Text Zur Kunst, November, Metropolis M, C Magazine, Artnet, and OnCurating. He has curated projects for the Whitney ISP in New York; ArteEast, New York; Wallach Gallery, New York; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; Pickle Bar, Berlin; Wiener Westfochen, Vienna; A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam; Queer Museum & Volkskundemuseum, Vienna; and the 13th Sharjah Biennial.

Artists

LIZ MAGIC LASER

Liz Magic Laser is a multimedia video and performance-based artist from New York City. Her recent work explores the efficacy of new-age techniques and psychological methods active in both corporate culture and political movements. Laser’s work has been shown at venues such as Luxembourg + Co., NY (2024); The Smithsonian American Art Museum (2023); Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2023); ICA Boston (2023); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021); MUDAM The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg (2021) and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018). Her work has been critically acclaimed in publications such as Text zur Kunst, Artforum, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Frieze, and Art in America.

SEVINC CALHANOGLU

Poet and artist Sevinç Çalhanoğlu’s work explores the themes of belonging, memory, and grief. Influenced by the transformative power of literature, she engages in a multidisciplinary creative practice that blends poetry, sound, printmaking, and painting. Her publications in English include A Promenade at Home (Bored Wolves, 2021) and Flying Dreams (Belladonna*, 2024). She is the founding editor of Moero, an online poetry journal based in Turkey, and currently resides in Brooklyn.

BES

bes is an experimenter, not an expert(!) whose work embraces fragmentation, improvisatory dissonance, multilingual expression and radical translation. a transMad* SWANAmerican poet-performer, doctoral student, tinkerer and crafter, bes is founder and operator of Pickled Sugarcane Press. Their dissentiary aesthetic praxes reflects profound commitments to antifascism, internationalism, and the liberatory struggles of racialized, minoritized and oppressed communities everywhere.

JOSE DE SANCRISTOBAL

José De Sancristóbal uses photography, video, film, and writing to consider different functions lens-based images perform within the configuration of the nation-state, particularly in relation to identification. His recent films and videos draw equally upon formal rigor and fantasy, skepticism and belief, with the hope of producing self-differing subjects and objects. Informed by the camera’s history as a tool to regulate citizens and their movement, his work disorganizes established identification techniques by viewing them through the lens of unmeasurable practices: fiction, role-play, memory, translation, and magical realism are used to poke holes in those devices purporting to administer the self—such as passport photographs, biographical information, legal status, or national borders. Sancristóbal received his MFA from Northwestern University, and a BFA from Universidad de Monterrey. He was a 2023-24 Studio Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. He is a 2024 Luminarts Foundation Visual Arts Fellow, and is currently a 2024-25 Fine Arts Work Center Fellow, in Provincetown, MA.

CORI KRESGE

Cori Kresge is a NY based dance artist, writer, massage therapist, and teacher. Kresge has collaborated and performed with numerous artists on works for stage and film including Liz Magic Laser, Rebecca Lazier, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, Charlie Atlas, Zuzka Kurtz, Ellen Cornfield, Esmé Boyce, Stephen Petronio Company, José Navas Compagnie Flak, Bill Young, Wendy Osserman, Madeline Hollander, Sally Silvers, and others. She is a featured performer in the CUNNINGHAM 3D documentary by Alla Kovgan. She regularly teaches for the Merce Cunningham Trust. She has written two chapbooks: isn’t devotion (No, Dear/Small Anchor first chapbook prize, 2019) and Combustion Suite, (Bored Wolves, 2023). In 2020 she founded Play With Matches Workshop, pairing international artists of different disciplines together to co-mentor one another as they create.