Genco Gulan Facts for Kids

Quick facts for kids Genco Gulan
Self-portrait with 4 eyes. Oil on Canvas. Pekin Collection.
Born	(1969-01-13) 13 January 1969 (age 56) Istanbul
Nationality	Turkish
Education	The New School,
Known for	Contemporary Art, Painting, Sculpture,
Movement	Idea art, Post Dada

Genco Gülan (Turkish pronunciation: [dʒendʒo ˈɟylan], born 13 January 1969) is a contemporary conceptual artist and theorist who lives and works in Istanbul. His transmedia and contextual work involves painting, found objects, new media, drawings, sculpture, photography, performance ,and video.

Gülan studied Media at The New School, New York. His art has appeared in Pera Museum, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, ZKM Karlsruhe, Triennale di Milano, Biennial of Tehran and Pompidou Center Paris. Gulan has had solo shows In the Gallery Arts in Berlin, Istanbul; State Painting and Sculpture Museums in Ankara, Izmir; Foto Gallery Lang, Zagreb and Artda Gallery, Seoul among other places.

Art
Works
Museum
Selected images
See also

Art

Twin Project, 2011. Performance by twin sisters; Yeliz and Deniz Çelebi.

Gülan uses text, codes and even his own DNA in his art. He is a new media artist. In a video piece called Tele-rugby, he filmed a female swim team playing rugby underwater with a TV monitor.

His experimental works include net-art, web art, AI generated images, Robot Games, SCIgen papers and online videos. Genco uses boron in his sculptures.

Works

The Android Statue was exhibited at the Antalya Archeology Museum from March 12 to March 20, 2014. Sketches of his kinetic marble statue series titled "Robotic Statues" were also shown. Genco Gülan has been working with robots in various university labs since the mid-1990s, using their hardware and software in his art projects. His artwork "Robots, Football and War (RFW)" was part of the computer game "Balkan Wars," which won an award at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück in 1995. His AI-generated play was used in the project "YEN! (New)," presented at the Pera Museum for the 16th Istanbul Theatre Festival.

Swimming Rocks, Çeşme, Alaçatı

Gülan's "The Great Conjugation" was exhibited at Boğaziçi University's Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences building, Washburn Hall, in May and June 2014. The installation used roughly 1,000 ties to create a route spanning all five floors of the building. Viewers were invited to bring their ties to add to the installation, which included ties of various colors, designs, and brands. This installation was also displayed at the Thessaloniki State Museum of Contemporary Art and the Ankara Contemporary Art Center in 2013. In 2011, Genco Gülan was a finalist for the Sovereign Art Foundation European Art Prize and held his first exhibition at the White Saloon inside the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences building, where he studied Political Science and International Relations from 1987 to 1991.

An exhibition titled "Swimming Rocks" was held on June 27, 2014, at the Art Gallery of Kırmızı Ardıç Kuşu, Gallery Metazori in Çeşme, Alaçatı, where Gülan spent much of his childhood. The "swimming rocks" refer to pumice rocks that float on water, found in the Aegean Sea around Çeşme and Alaçatı. Gülan created the "Swimming Rocks" from these and other stones. Works by his mother, Tezer Gülan, and his grandmother, Saime İzmiroğlu, were also featured. Additionally, Gülan presented his "New Landscape" series, an interpretation of landscapes as barcodes, and his "Digital Ghost" series, which involved painting images from his laptop onto large canvases.

Museum

As an art project in 1997, Genco Gülan established the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum.

"At first the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum developed as an art series in the manner of Duchamp and Broodthaers until the end of the 1990s. Later it evolved when it was transferred to the Internet. It turned into a new age institution that organized exhibitions, workshops and provided logistic support on cyber space."

For almost a decade, the museum ran a residency program called "I live in a Museum" and hosted artists from the U.S., the Netherlands, Spain, and China at its Galata location.

Gülan's monograph; "Conceptual Colors" edited by Marcus Graf, is co-published by Revolver Publishing in Berlin in collaboration with Artist Istanbul. His books are available at libraries such as the German National Library, SALT Istanbul, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas J. Watson Library and the Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University. Gülan founded the Web Biennial at the turn of the century, served on the Board of Balkan Biennial in Thessaloniki, International Programming Committee of ISEA Singapore in 2008 and was a guest editor for Second Nature: International Journal of Creative Media. He was in the jury for Turgut Pura Art Prize in Izmir and teaches at Mimar Sinan Academy and Boğaziçi University.