Özge Çelikaslan

Özge Çelikaslan

Özge Çelikaslan (b. 1979) is an artist, activist and researcher. She is the co-founder and member of Koza Visual Culture and Arts Association, Artıkişler / Wastedworks and Videoccupy, artist collectives who make extraordinary contributions to the development of artistic productions with video installations that have a strong social and political concept.

Videoccupy was a video collective founded during the Gezi resistance in Turkey by people from different experiences and backgrounds. The aim was to record and collect visual material of the resistance processes between the 27th of May and the 31st of July 2013 in Gezi Park, Istanbul. With the establishment of the collective, an archive was created, comprising the visual material. The archive has online access and is supposed to function as a visual source for collective memory. Videoccupy was disbanded after the resistance, the bak.ma and Gezi archives were launched on an online platform in 2014.

As a PhD scholar, her research focuses on the political role of autonomous digital media archives in the Middle East. Since 2013, she has been working on the bak.ma open digital media archive of social movements in Turkey. Personally and with the Artikisler video collective, she has been involved in numerous solo and mixed exhibitions and biennials worldwide. She has co-edited the books Autonomous Archiving (2016) and Surplus of Istanbul (2014) with Alper Sen and Pelin Tan.

>Her works, and the practices of her collectives, are centred around the political issues of Turkey’s recent past, such as: ethnic discrimination, gender issues, political violence and massacres, forced migration, refugees, labour in urban space – all as part of a collective social memory.

At Framer Framed Özge Çelikaslan was a guest speaker at the finissage program Collectively (Re)shaping the Archive, on 7 Jan 2018, to accompany the exhibition House of Wisdom, curated by Collective Çukurcuma (Naz Cuguoğlu and Mine Kaplangı). Also at Framer Framed, Çelikaslan was a guest speaker during the evening The Archive: Unveiling the Present in 2014 to discuss the projects of Videoccupy and unfolding politics in Turkey. In the same year, Çelikaslan was a guest speaker for the symposium Art and Political Conflict, discussing how the relationship between art and political conflict has been significantly reshaped by the proliferation of digital media and the internet, as part of the public program for the exhibition curated Robert Kluijver.

She lives and works in Ankara, Turkey.