Inspired by…

Art Laboratory Berlin is delighted to invite you to take part in our discursive format – a reading club, curated by Tuçe Erel. It takes place in tandem with our colloquium, curated by Regine Rapp.

Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce.

The project follows up Tuçe Erel’s Posthumanism Reading Group, organized between 2018-2020. After co-reading and discussing plenty of seminal texts in two years, the club is transforming into a new discussion, presentation and reading program, an online and offline exchange platform in a non-hierarchical and non-institutional infrastructure in the fields of arts, science and technology.

Guest Artist on 14 March 2022

Gülşah Mursaloğlu

In the framework of the Vicious Cycle group exhibition, the first artist talk of the exhibition and the first reading club of 2023, welcomes Gülşah Mursaloğlu. This session of inspired by will be online via zoom meeting hosted by Art Laboratory Berlin. Gülşah Mursaloğlu selected two texts in relation to her work Devouring the Earth, in Perishable Quantities, which is featured in the exhibition. The work hosts various processes of leakage, amalgamation and digestion across different temporalities. It aims to underscore the entanglement within the acts of eating/ consuming/ devouring that is often promoted as choice-based as well as the points and practices of continuity between human and other agencies.

Gülşah Mursaloğlu completed her BA in Sociology at Boğaziçi University and received her MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In her works, she explores materiality, matter’s agency, and human and non-human temporalities. Her installations, which emerge after an in-depth and extensive research process, don’t remain stable in form, and rather manifest themselves as dynamic and fluid systems through their ephemeral nature. Her recent projects investigate the shift in potato’s temporality in the past centuries, terrestrial sequences, and the ways in which voluntarily and involuntarily eat/devour/consume the earth and actors from the underground. Recent exhibitions include “The Memory in Our Bones”, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2022); “Hosting Bodies”, Sanatorium, Istanbul, Turkey (2021); “Once Upon a Time Inconceivable”, Protocinema, Istanbul, Turkey (2021); “3rd Industrial Art Biennial”, Labin, Croatia (2020); “Material Play”, Salisbury University Galleries, Salisbury, USA (2019); “YFD 10: One Must Continue” Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey (2019); “A Notation, for Every Crossing”, poşe, Istanbul, Turkey (2019); “Artificial Life”, Chicago Artists Coalition, Chicago, USA (2018) and “Other Hours”, 601 Artspace, New York, USA (2017).

Reading Materials

1) A. Laurie Palmer, Silicon, from In the Aura of a Hole, 2014, Black Dog Press 

2) Carlo Rovelli, The World Without Time, from The Order of Time, 2018, Riverhead Books

Venue: Zoom meeting link and the texts will be shared with the registered participants.

Inspired by… reading club meetings are not recorded to create a safe space for guest artists and participants to talk about their practice.