disco_bar: Özge Açıkkol, The party is over, 50X70 cm poster for Bucharest Biennale 8, 2018.

HENS: Özge Açıkkol, İsimsiz, 2017, İstanbul

Name
Özge Açıkkol
Biography
Özge Açıkkol studied fine arts and painting at Marmara University in Istanbul. She is an artist and a member of the Oda Projesi collective. Currently, she is a fellow of the Istanbul-Berlin Exchange Program, made possible by the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) and the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, as well as DEPO in Istanbul. She also took part in BAK’s (basis voor actuele kunst) Fellowship for Situated Practice between September 2021 and June 2022. Recently, she participated in the Reflections From The Women’s Archives exhibition at Depo İstanbul in 2022. She has been involved in numerous collaborations and projects both domestically and internationally as a member of the artist collective Oda Projesi. In autumn 2022, the project ANA#3, which explores motherhood, will be presented at the 17th Istanbul Biennial.
Artist Statement
Özge Açıkkol works at the intersection of art, socio-spatial practices, literature, and social pedagogy. She is a collector of situational usages of Istanbul's public spaces, using photographic and narrative documentation. Her current research is on the urgency of recovering public space as part of the culture of "living together" in an era of authoritarian attitudes and agoraphobia: How can artists establish organic relations with social movements and develop tools facilitating new socialities? Since 2013, with Oda Projesi, she questions the transformative capacity of artist mothers through a series of meetings with women precariously working in cultural fields. Hence, she is interested in reclaiming the fundamental and invisible act of "caring" as a support structure in the public sphere beyond its trapped interpretations in the private.