Esra Oskay
Esra Oskay is an artist and academic. Her ongoing work examines the asymmetries of visibility, claims of accessibility, and transparency as a promise of equity, and explores alternative means of documentation that probe the limits of what can be seen and said.
During the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice Oskay will focus on the implicit and explicit expressions of self-censorship as a form of regulating the visible and speakable. With a focus on the field of cultural production in contemporary Turkey, the suggested inquiry will aim to reflect on the definitions and manifold operations of censorship, its impact on individual and collective expressions, and the affective economies of self-censorship that ripples with shame, guilt, anger, and fear. Her research will problematize the politics of voice and visibility as the undisputed forms of political action and speculate on silent tactics of nonalignment.
Oskay received her PhD degree from Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh in 2014 and since then has worked at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University, Ankara. Most recently she participated in the 8th Çanakkale Biennale: How do we work together?, 2022; and had her solo show Project: Ankara, at Elgiz Museum, İstanbul, 2022. She received the 2020 border_less book fund for her work studying the paintings hanging behind the closed doors of official chambers of political representation. Since 2022 she has co-edited non-profit online journal Çapak, focusing on the cultural production in the peripheries of Turkey.
Oskay is based in Ankara and part of the BAK Cell, İstanbul, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice.