DİRİMART – AN AMAZING STORY FROM AN AMAZING TEAM!
There is a great team behind the magic that Dirimart delivers to the art world. We arranged an interview to get to know them better.
Given the freedom to choose any work of art from the Dirimart archive, which one stimulates your sense of touch or somehow touches you at a spiritual level?
Dilruba Ayhan - Media Relations
“I can’t help but wonder if the exclamation mark on the glass is the rebellion of the little boy sitting in the background of a space that might be a living room, a cafe, or a kitchen?”
Baran Bayda – Operational Coordinator
“Both the district (Dolapdere) that inspired Miss Mon and the location of Dirimart in Dolapdere confirm that this work touched me on a personal level.”
Ayşe Aktunalı – Artist Relations
“Like meditation, the flow of the sculpture helps me maintain calm and reminds me to breathe every time I look at it.”
Canan Erbil – Artist Relations
“Every time I look at Immersive Integral Radiance, I can’t help but imagine the performative and even largely meditative moments experienced by the artist as she worked.”
Cem Karakaya – Galeri Asistanı
“Do I belong here or somewhere else? Could I exist without a home or even roots?”
Dilara Altuğ – Artist Relations
“In terms of colour, form, and positioning, Ayşe Erkmen’s sculpture Encircled activates the sense of touch in me, in addition to our primary senses of sight and sound.”
Levent Özmen - Director
“I feel keenly attracted to this piece as it indicates an important turning point for the artist. I can share his thrill just by looking at it.”
Senem Özgören - Director
“Words always touch me: a beautiful sentence, a tone of voice, messages.”
Çiçek Öztek – Publications Director
“Just like bees, these women have honey dripping from their hair and are surrounded by a cloud of bees, symbolising labour, collective work, and beauty.”
Zeynep Yazıcı – Corporate Communications Director
“In September 1955, Aliye Berger arrived to find her workshop on fire. It must have shaken her profoundly.”
Alca Ağabeyoğlu – Artist Relations
“Anselm Reyle makes art from recovered materials that are totally unrelated to art. His acclaimed foil paintings place these items in a completely different setting to create a great illusion that makes the viewer want to touch the work.”
Hazer Özil founded Dirimart in 2002 in Istanbul’s Nişantaşı district. Over the past two decades, the pioneering art gallery has hosted world-famous artists such as Thomas Bayrle, Hermann Nitsch, Shirin Neshat, Bernard Frize, Julian Rosefeldt, Candida Höfer, Franz Ackermann, Peter Zimmermann, Sarah Morris and Ghada Amer in Turkey for the first time. The gallery has also assumed the role of representing Turkish artists internationally, such as Sarkis, Ayşe Erkmen, Hayal Pozantı, Nasan Tur, Güçlü Öztekin, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Özlem Günyol-Mustafa Kunt and 20th-century artists like Fahrelnissa Zeid, Abidin Elderoğlu, and Yüksel Arslan.
Dirimart opened its second gallery space in Dolapdere in May 2016. As one of the biggest galleries in Istanbul, Dirimart has large exhibition and office spaces and an open-air sculpture garden designed by Studio MDA founder and architect Markus Dochantschi.
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