Lecture date: 2011-02-24
Can Altay is an artist living in Istanbul whose installations of videos, books, mappings and photographs incorporate different forms of research on the urban environment. Altay studies improvised architectures in the city, as well as hidden structures of support, unauthorised systems of organisation and models of co-habitation. He has just finalised a project called Church Street Partners’ Gazette, a local newspaper on urban issues, at The Showroom, London.
Altay has had solo exhibitions at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2008), Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2006) and Spike Island, Bristol (2007). His work has been included in biennials in Istanbul; Havana; and Gwangju, Taipei; and in museums and galleries such as the Walker Art Center (USA), VanAbbe Museum (Netherlands), ZKM (Germany), PS1 MoMA (USA), and Platform Garanti (Turkey). He is a co-founder of art, design and publishing collective Diplomacy in Reflex, editor of Ahali: A Journal for Setting a Setting and was a co-curator of the ‘Refuge’ section of the 4th Architecture Biennial of Rotterdam in 2009.
