SEMINAR:From Embroidery to Bioart

Speaker: Damla Yalcın

Title: From Embroidery to Bioart 

Date/Time: February 21, 2024, 13:40 - 14:30

Room:FENS G035

Abstract: Damla Yalçın works with installations that the audience becomes part of by employing stitching and embroidery techniques and different mediums in her productions. Intertwining tradition and contemporary art, she takes advantage of the production possibilities offered by the new media. Synthesizing different production techniques, the artist takes the viewer and the artwork on a journey into space, memory, and identity. Through her works, she explores how we fill the space we inhabit with all the dialectics of life, showing how we gradually take root in a "corner of the world." Yalçın continues her research, production, and experiments on bacteria, yeast, and fungi in the field of bio art as an extension of her master's thesis. 

Bio: Damla Yalçın was born in Ankara in 1995. She studied painting at Ankara Anadolu Fine Arts High School between 2009 and 2013, graduating as a valedictorian. She continued her bachelor study at the painting department at Marmara University, and she followed the bachelor courses as part of her education at the Akademia Sztuk Pieknych in Wroclaw, Poland, from 2013 to 2017, graduating with honors. In 2023, she completed her master's degree in Textiles at Marmara University, focusing on sustainability and textiles with her thesis titled “The Place of Biotextiles in Art Practices.”

The artist has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Turkey and abroad (Germany, Poland, Korea, Hong Kong, Moldova, Italy, Cyprus). She held her first solo exhibition, titled The Memory of the Unrememberable, in 2019 at Krank Art Gallery. She has participated in artist residency programs in Moldova and Italy, and has been a guest on various cultural and art TV programs. She continues living and working in Istanbul.

Yalçın will work on her interdisciplinary project about the use of alternative materials for denim production during her residency at Gate 27. She will research and experiment with the use of Scoby, which is used to ferment kombucha tea and explore the opportunity of slime mold utilization for fabric production, as well as produce artwork within the scope of the project.

The artist has joined ORTA's Bluesky program, which was co-developed by Gate 27 and ORTA, a leading denim fabric manufacturer based in Turkey.