Artists? what artists? Art? what art?

Some of the artists I'm living with/working with/meeting:

Julie, one of the organizers, and Laleh, from Berlin who draws and does shadow puppetry;

London-based Ughetta and her friend Chris of Chris and Anna, visiting from London. Ughetta is a graphic designer who also does illustration;

Anika, the other organizer, who uses circus-based skills in her performances;

Korhan, who is a digital composer and sound artist. He has put me in contact with two other Istanbuli who may be able to help me construct an kinetic sound device. Tomorrow I meet with one, Ekmel of AmberPlatform http://www.amberplatform.org/ and will see what happens. Then there was Jesper, who returned home to Denmark last week.

His three-month residency, courtesy of the Danish government, was occupied by his visual compilation of an Encyclopaedia of Smorrebrode for his now on-going exhibition in Copenhagen. These watercolours were made after creating his graphic design-based imagery. I visited him here in his studio/residency, where he had a really great view of the Sea of Marmara, impossible to capture with a camera.

Finally, here is Deniz as her alter-ego, Miss Universe, performing Fistula last week in the residency workspace:

Deniz is a Turkish performance artist now living in Vienna.

Went to one of the new contemporary art spaces last week, SALT Beyoğlu, and finally saw an interesting work, part of an exhibition that was impenetrable to me as it was all in Turkish. The show, Scared of Murals, concerned itself with a protest during the 1970's, displaying pages from newspapers, etc. There were just a small number of paintings and sculptures including this work, Suite de l'Operation Organe (la Caisse) 1973, by the artist Sarkis, a Paris-based Turkish-born Armenian. I could not figure out how any of the works fit into to rest of the show, but I liked this one a lot (çok güzel).