Work the room

Work the Room is an open end process project where the roles of the determining factors of contemporary art production -artist, audience, space and curator- become subject to change, to be played on and to be problematized. Upon the invitation from the curator Övül Durmuºo»lu (Istanbul/Vienna), Muruvvet Turkyilmaz (Istanbul) and Marijn van Kreij (Amsterdam) have come together in GON comic book store in Istanbul -on Yeni Çarº¹ Street descending fromGalatasaray Square- to work together with the shop’s living and working conditions between 4th-11th September 2008. As the fifth day has arrived, the two artists -working on inscription and writing as a personal and collective performance territory- have been investigating the circumstances of producing together with the curator, the audience and the space during Work the Room. And Övül Durmuºo»lu breaks in the flux of ongoing production through not only putting different obstructions, objects and comments but also inviting surprise guests.

In Istanbul, the production of contemporary art projects focus on the result most of the time. During Work the Room process -which develops in the area where viewing producing the art work and viewing it  come  across each other- the activities of the artists and the curator are being recorded. The records updated on http://worktheroomproject.blogspot.com will be transformed into a publication afterwards.


The first participant invited by Durmusoglu to intervene in the project was the curator Adnan Y¹ld¹z (Berlin/Istanbul). Y¹ld¹z read the  Anatolian fairytale of Kelo»lan through the approach of oral history leaking into the everyday politics, accompanied by turkish breakfast, on 4th September.Meanwhile, Mehmet Dere (Izmir) made his intervention » Not Blood but Milk!». On 9th September, the curator Basak Senova (Istanbul) interrupted Work the Room through questioning  Muruvvet Turkyilmaz, Marijn van Kreij and Övül Durmusoglu about the process and the methodologies in research during the project. Within this week, another young artist Caner Aslan (Istanbul) will realize his interruption and Can Altay (Istanbul) will accompany Marijn van Kreij at Aç¹k Masa (Round Table) -initated by Muruvvet Turkyilmaz- to talk about his artistic process and production.