Alper Turan (he, they) (b. 1993, Ankara) is a curator and writer currently based in New York, Berlin, and Istanbul. His ongoing practice and research draw from transnational and transtemporal queer strategies, abstractions, archives, and fiction. Turan is a 2023–24 curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and was awarded a 2023–24 General Idea fellowship from the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Turan is co-founder of STRÜKTÜR, a Berlin-based association dedicated to forming and expanding the support structures for arts & artists from the geography of Turkey.
His curatorial work understands the exhibition as an experimental collective site of knowledge production and action generation, and he tests to undo entitlements and expectancies from institutional modes of curatorship. Between 2016-2018, within the curatorial collective Das Art Project, he curated site-responsive projects by making non-accessible, gentrified-to-be urban heritages across Istanbul, including ‘‘Genetically Modified’’ (2017), commissioned for the 13th Sharjah Biennial’s off-site exhibition. In 2018, he curated an exhibition on HIV & AIDS in Turkey as a research-creation project, which considered the exhibition an ethnographic field. In response to escalating anti-queer rhetorics in Turkey and beyond, he experiments with undetectable, uncensorable queer aesthetics. He worked as a curator at Protocinema (2020–24), a cross-cultural contemporary art organization.
Turan participated in residency and fellowship programs at the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, International Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans; the ARTER Research Program, Istanbul; the Schwules Museum, Berlin; the Camargo Foundation, Cassis; and the Cite des Arts, Paris. His writings appeared in November, Artnet, Text Zur Kunst, C Magazine, On Curating, Metropolis M, Argonotlar.com, and Sanat Dünyamız.
CV HERE︎
alper@protocinema.org
+49 176 70518587 (calls, telegram, signal)
+90 506 8706808 (whatsapp)
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