Genco Gulan

Biography

In 1997 a museum appeared in Istanbul that had no collection in the usual sense and no permanent building: the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum. It was devised by Genco Gulan, and the museum was itself one of his works.

Gulan was born on 13 January 1969 in Istanbul. From 1987 to 1991 he studied at Boğaziçi University, in political science and international relations, or, by other accounts, political science and art. He later continued his education in New York and took a master’s degree in media and communication at The New School.

He began his career in the early 1990s with conceptual and media-based works that returned to the themes of artificial intelligence, gender, politics and digital culture. By the mid-1990s he was already working with robots in university laboratories. His work “Robots, Football and War” became part of the computer game “Balkan Wars”, which won an award at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück in 1995. Later he made kinetic marble sculptures in the series “Robotic Statues”; “The Android Statue” and sketches for the series were shown at the Antalya Museum in 2014. In the video piece “Tele-rugby” he filmed a women’s swim team playing rugby underwater with a television monitor. Boron is named among the materials of his sculptures, and his works include net art, AI-generated images, “Robot Games” and papers generated with the SCIgen program. A play written by artificial intelligence was the basis of the project “YEN! (New)”, presented at the Pera Museum during the 16th Istanbul Theatre Festival.

Gulan conceived the Contemporary Art Museum as a series in the spirit of Duchamp and Broodthaers. By the end of the 1990s the project had moved onto the internet and become, in his own words, an institution of a new kind: it organised exhibitions and workshops and gave logistical support in cyberspace. At the museum’s premises in Galata a residency programme, “I live in a Museum”, hosted artists from the United States, the Netherlands, Spain and China. Gulan also founded the Web Biennial, served on the board of the Balkan Biennial in Thessaloniki and, in 2008, on the international programming committee of ISEA in Singapore. He was a guest editor of the journal “Second Nature” and sat on the jury of the Turgut Pura Art Prize in Izmir.

His work has been shown at the Pera Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Triennale di Milano, the Tehran Biennial and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Solo exhibitions have been held at the Artist gallery in Berlin, at the State Art and Sculpture Museum in Ankara, at the İzmir Painting and Sculpture Museum, at Foto Gallery Lang in Zagreb and at Artda in Seoul.

The installation “The Great Conjugation” filled five floors of the building of the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Boğaziçi University, where he had once studied: about a thousand ties formed a route through the whole building. It was shown in 2013 at the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki and at the Ankara Contemporary Art Center, and in 2014 at the university. There, in the White Saloon of the faculty, his first exhibition was held in 2011; in the same year he became a finalist for the Sovereign Art Foundation’s European Art Prize.

In 2014 Gallery Metazori in Alaçatı (Çeşme) showed “Swimming Rocks”, inspired by the pumice of the Aegean Sea. Beside his series “New Landscape” and “Digital Ghost” hung works by his mother, Tezer Gülan, and his grandmother, Saime İzmiroğlu. The exhibition “Ancient Future” (2017, curated by Hasan Bülent Kahraman) included pieces from his long-running sculpture series. In 2018 the İzmir Painting and Sculpture Museum held a solo exhibition of his paintings, “After Picasso”, and in 2021 he began the series “Modern Art Is Over”, which uses unconventional venues.

As a theorist Gulan introduced the concepts “idea of art”, “post-postmodernism” and “AIstory”. He has spoken at conferences at Yale University, the School of Visual Arts in Cologne, Incheon University and the New York Institute of Technology, and teaches at the Mimar Sinan Academy and Boğaziçi University. His monograph “Conceptual Colors of Genco Gülan”, edited by Marcus Graf, was published by Revolver in Berlin and the Istanbul gallery Artist. His publications are held at the German National Library, at SALT Research and at Yale University.