An artist talk: Hasan Aksaygın in conversation with Serkan Karas

Saturday 25 June 2022 at 18:00 

NiMAC, Reading Room

Within the framework of Project Room #7 NiMAC [Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Associated with the Pierides Foundation] presents an artist’ talk. Hasan Aksaygın meets with Serkan Karas for a discussion on their works and the parallels connecting these: the factual research and the fictional narratives created from these. The conversation will span from Aksaygın’s exhibition Project Room #7: Frenk Bey, Fortress and the Thing at NiMAC and Karas’ book “Constructive Imperialism, Experts and Crisis in Colonial Cyprus”, which has been a starting point in Aksaygın’s current installation at NiMAC. 

Hasan Aksaygın (Natis) is a conceptual painter who lives and works in Berlin. His art materializes itself through multiple parallel and distinct research-based practices. He creates, embodies, and instrumentalizes different performative artist personae for each of these practices, that challenge the social understanding and the role of the artist as a (post-)modern subject. These alter-egos deal with various fields like; personal or communal memory and forgetting, speculative (non-)linear temporality and storytelling, gender, post-colonialism, and new materialism. Besides his art practice, he works towards completing his doctorate at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg on art-historical and contemporary alter ego use of visual artists and why these mental and physical alternations or mutations take place in artists’ lives.

Serkan Karas studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and completed his PhD in History of Technology at the University of Athens. He is interested in long-term histories of themes intertwining infrastructures, environment and power, and he has worked on research projects studying the agriculture, energy and water-management sectors. His research is specifically focused on cases from Cyprus, Greece and Turkey.