“Passing On”
Nancy Atakan

Artist Talk and Book Launch

February 4, 2016 / 18:30

Complementing the exhibition This is Not a Love Song: Video Art and Pop Music Crossovers and presented as part of the program “Music Embodied”, artist Nancy Atakan talks about her practice and her new book “Passing On” published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, following a screening of her videos.

Over the past decades American-Turkish artist Nancy Atakan has developed a practice in which the past and future intersect in order to complicate our understanding of the present. With a great sensitivity to how memory, history, gender, identity and national narratives operate, in particular in relation to the female body, Atakan situates herself as an artist of a mixed background who occupies an in-between position. Passing On includes a selection of Atakan’s oeuvre made over the past decade, but concentrates on works that highlight professional women who were born in the Ottoman period, matured and worked in the Turkish Republic, and whom - the artist believes - should not be forgotten. Merging fact with fiction, and her own personal story, Passing On traces a female lineage that remembers, inspires and passes poetic strength and value on to posterity.

About Nancy Atakan
Born in the USA, the visual artist and art historian, Nancy Atakan, received her BA degree from Mary Washington College in 1968 before moving to Istanbul, Turkey, in 1969. Since then, she has lived and worked in Istanbul, where she received her PhD in art history from Mimar Sinan University in 1994 and has taught at the Bosphorus University and Robert College. From May through June of 2006, she participated in a residency program concentrating on the relationship between art and language at the Banff Art Center in Alberta, Canada. She has published numerous articles and two books entitled, Arayışlar, Yapı Kredi publications, Istanbul, 1998, and Sanatta Alternatif Arayışlar, Karakalem publications, Izmir, 2008. In 2008 with the artist Volkan Aslan, she opened 5533, an Istanbul non-profit off space.

The event is free of admissions and will be in Turkish and English with consecutive translation.

Temporary Exhibition

This is Not a Love Song

Pera Museum presented an exhibition titled This is Not a Love Song: Video Art and Pop Music Crossovers which traced the genealogy of the relations between video art and pop music.

This is Not a Love Song

Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

Between 1963 and 1966 Andy Warhol worked at making film portraits of all sorts of characters linked to New York art circles. Famous people and anonymous people were filmed by Andy Warhol’s 16 mm camera, for almost four minutes, without any instructions other than ‘to get in front of the camera’.

Soothsayer Serenades I Serenades to the Sun by Kornelia Binicewicz

Soothsayer Serenades I Serenades to the Sun by Kornelia Binicewicz

Today we are thrilled to present the third playlist of Amrita Hepi’s Soothsayer Serenades series as part of the Notes for Tomorrow exhibition. The playlist titled Serenades to the Sun is presented by Kornelia Binicewiczon Pera Museum’s Spotify account.

Mosques in the 18th and 19th Century Paintings

Mosques in the 18th and 19th Century Paintings

In the works of western painters, we encounter mosques as the primary architectural elements that reflect the identity of the city of Istanbul. Often we can recognize the depicted landscape as Istanbul simply from the mosques.