Adaptor project: Collective (Gülşah Özgen and Sıla Bozdeveci)
Gülşah Özgen, a filmmaker and researcher, actively participates in political film projects and instructs a course that explores the disruption of traditional duality (interior/exterior, time/space) in architecture. She researches about “companions” outside of power and control, as influenced by feminist storytelling, speculative fiction, and experimental cinema. Through her research, Ozgen delves into the intricacies of border-blurring between speculative, ever-changing, multi-layered, and entangled origin stories, focusing on narratives around fertility, motherhood, and reproduction technologies.
During the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, Ozgen, alongside adaptör.projekt, aims to explore the authorities’ status in the concept of “becoming with” as a way to organize and to emphasize plurality. She will investigate how the term “companion” might become a site of resistance and a political strategy for togetherness that deconstructs traditional dualities.
Ozgen has worked around gender hacking, speculative fiction, and the boundaries imposed on individuals by society, geography, politics, and economies both in Turkey and internationally, in places including Akbank Art Center, Beyoğlu; and Art Laboratory Berlin, Berlin. She has participated in artist residencies at the Media Archeology Laboratory, Bilkent University (2022), and Foreign Objekt Posthuman Studies Lab, CA (2022). Her films have been screened at the Boden International Film Festival, Boden, 2021; the 6th International Women Filmmakers Festival, Izmir, 2023; and ULYSSES European Odyssey Program, Holland, 2023. Recently, as a filmmaker, she has been thinking about memory, resistance, and posthuman ontological figures in the semiotics of cinema.
Ozgen lives and works in İstanbul and is part of the İstanbul Bienali Research and Production Program, İstanbul, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice.
Sıla Bozdeveci is a researcher and architect who is interested in ethics and developing a critical spatial approach to her work that examines institutional structures, collective becomings, and science fiction. Bozdeveci received a transdisciplinary architecture education, then worked for internationally recognized practices like Arup, where she focused on devising strategies for public interest and actively contributed to the biomaterial research team. She completed her postgraduate studies at İstanbul Bilgi University, İstanbul, in 2023 and then joined their Faculty of Architecture as a lecturer.
Bozdeveci examines the evolving relationship between subjects and space by exploring capitalist and advanced capitalist practices such as the enclosure of commons, the privatization of vitality, and commodification. She has exhibited in venues including: The Architectural Association, London, 2015; and Salt Beyoğlu, Beyoğlu, 2018. Bozdeveci has given talks at: Arkitera Travel Scholarship, 2019; Good Design Izmir, 2022; and Akbank Art Center, Beyoğlu, 2022.
Throughout the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, Bozdeveci, as part ofadaptör.projekt, will delve into the transformative capacities inherent in DIY hacking, and reimagine the potentials within this collective activity. She will explore the power of curating and altering found objects from the streets of İstanbul. Her research centers on how collecting and DIY hacking can enhance unsolidified ways of collective knowledge within local communities—underscoring her dedication to pushing the boundaries of institutions and portraying appropriate representations of alternative practices. Bozdeveci lives and works in İstanbul, and is part of the Istanbul Bienali Research and Production Program, İstanbul, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice.