Gul Kozacioglu has been working in the public sphere since 2001 with music, dance, exhibitions, performances and actions. She has worked within visual and aural media, utilizing photography and video in installations, performances, music events and music videos. As a performance artist, she works with dance, and initiates situations which wish to dissolve the dichotomy of artist and audience.
A collaborative practice, instigated during the process of her exhibition of the same name, CELEBRATION / CELEB-RATION, in 2006, creates through commitment with varying individuals of different backgrounds projects to bring together usually uncombined media for public works; for-example information technology, dance and public screens in her 2008 / 2009 SMS LOVE performance. With some of her instigations spanning 30 – 50 collaborators from around the world, CELEBRATION / CELEB-RATION projects are generated through community solidarity and communal consciousness. – a community based process.
Her artistic practice has revolved around concepts of private and public, and time and space as emotional notions as well as architectural spaces or dimensions. She began exhibiting and creating performances in public space, in areas which were not necessarily designated spaces for exhibitions. From this she used the notions of private and public as subject and technique for performance exhibitions. These performances/happenings evolved into a collaborative practice, creating and presenting with open doors to process policy in the public space, bringing the artist and audience together in the creation of the work.
She believes in the role of creativity and solidarity within society to promote understanding and has utilized guerilla information and gossip media flows to create a community of creators and participants in her projects which are spurred by actions, events and calls of pertinence in social life .Her works are at an evolutionary point where happenings, performance and interactivity meet.
BIO
Gul Kozacioglu is based in New York, with inspirational periods in Istanbul, Copenhagen, Berlin & Paris. She was born in Ankara, Turkey, yet raised in Denmark with extensive travelling peropds around Europe due to the political views of her family. These led to a prohibition of their entry to Turkey and an eventual loss of citizenship. She first visited Turkey, this time with a danish citizenship in her late teens, and stayed to incorporate the culture and history to her experiences whilst studing Philosophy at Bosphorus University, and later Philosophy of Design at METU. After a sabbatical period in New York, she set up her studio in Istanbul where she worked within visual / aural media before returning to NY again in 2008.
Her work carries a sense of dislocation and a wish to step above notions of nationality, space and time, and often utilizes a visually fantastic language even in their dealings with daily life subjects like crises, censorship and racism. Her works are often based on a sense of constant change and universal one-ness.
NOW
CABARET MUSE ME, as an open doors/open process simulcast performance project of 7 episodes presented consecutively utilizing internet broadcast
CONTINUE-ING
SPLATTERPOOL : a new creative space for open development of art and performances, in Brooklyn, NY.
SMS LOVE : in re-development with new technology/methods for performance in 2011.
