WORLD WEATHER NETWORK TALKS #2

The conversation between the editors of Art Unlimited (Merve Akar Akgün) and m-est.org (Özge Ersoy, Merve Ünsal) will take as a point of departure the series of texts that m-est.org has been working on with the invitation of SAHA as part of the World Weather Network. With the artist texts published as part of the series, m-est.org focuses on artistic production that deals with weather forecasts and the high and low pressures of the cities we live and produce in. The discussion will focus on transformation, crisis, and fabulations of futures at the intersection of publishing and visual arts. 

Part of the World Weather Network’s year-long programme of artist-led weather stations, online weather reports, and live events fostering debate and discussion about the climate crisis, in this conversation the urgency of collaboration across the arts, sciences and policy-making is explored by two contrasting minds, meeting for the first time.

Commissioned by SAHA for World Weather Network.

Part of the weather station: Istanbul, Turkey - find out more here.  

Merve Akar Akgün

Born in Istanbul in 1984. Studied sociology and completed her MFA degree in Sociology of Contemporary Art at the Université de la Sorbonne, Paris. Worked for ten years in Paris as a freelance editor at various publications, such as Crash Magazine, l’Interview, l’Officiel, Cahiers de Cinéma, Doolittle, and more. Currently, she is the editor-in-chief of Unlimited Publications, an Istanbul-based publisher of five magazines. She also gives workshops on contemporary art writing.

Özge Ersoy

Özge Ersoy is Public Programmes Lead at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Before joining AAA, she was Curator and Program Manager of collectorspace, Istanbul. She is also Managing Editor of m-est.org, an online publication conceived as an artist-centered initiative.Her writings have been included in ArtAsiaPacific, Bidoun, Brand-New-Life, Domus, Modern Painters, and The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, among others. Ersoy holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She lives and works in Hong Kong.

Merve Ünsal

Merve Ünsal is a visual artist who lives and works in Istanbul. She researches the boundaries of photography and text in her works and traces the moments and situations when the unspoken is transformed into the unspeakable. Her works are always image-driven and she thinks through the media of photography, video, sound, as well as site-specific installations. She has shown her work in a variety of contexts across the world, most often through artist-driven initiatives in Cairo, Beirut, New Delhi, Toronto; she has been supported by the Delfina Foundation (London), Praksis (Oslo), Fogo Island Arts, Art Metropole (Toronto), University of Delaware (Lewes), and SAHA Studio (Istanbul) to participate in artist residencies. She took part in the learning program at Ashkal Alwan (Beirut), Homework Space in the academic year, 2014-2015. She is also one of the editors at m-est.org, a publication dedicated to think about artist-centered publishing.