ALPER TURAN - PROTOCINEMA EMERGING CURATOR FOR 2021

Announcing Alper Turan as Protocinema Emerging Curator for 2021, who will be mentored by: David J. Getsy, Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Krist Gruijthuijsen, Director, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Maura Reilly, Independent Curator and Mari Spirito, Executive Director, Curator, Protocinema, Istanbul, New York.

Protocinema launched our annual Protocinema Emerging Curator Series (PECS) in 2015, which provides professional training in the form of learning through doing, a professional mentorship program. PECS is an incubator for emerging curators to gain hands-on experience in exhibition making, from inception to completion, including fundraising and collaboration with partner institutions. Each selected curator works with mentors from the local and international arts community in order to gain guidance, knowledge and introductions through the process of realizing an exhibition from “soup to nuts”. PECS 2021 exhibition will be presented in Istanbul.

Alper Turan, 1993, Ankara, is a curator and researcher based in Istanbul and Berlin. Her current research and curatorial practice focus on queer strategies and methodologies which includes but not limited to collective fiction and fictional archive-building, appropriation, and anonymity. Between 2016-2018, with a curatorial collective Das Art Project, he co-curated four site-responsive exhibitions including ‘‘Genetically Modified’’ (2017) commissioned for 13th Sharjah Biennial’s off-site exhibition. In 2018, Turan curated Positive Space, an exhibition project on HIV/AIDS in Istanbul. This project also lays the ground of his cultural studies master research in Sabancı University in which she merged critical reading of artworks with (auto)ethnographic accounts. Turan co-curated HIVstories research exhibition which has been travelling around Berlin, Warsaw and Istanbul. Turan participated in International Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans (2019), ARTER Research Program, Istanbul (2019-20) and worked temporarily for Schwules Museum, Berlin (2018), Collecteurs (2019), Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2019). In 2020, Turan started her PhD in theory and history of arts at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg (HFBK).