May 13 2025

Will Flow Free: İz Öztat in conversation with Lara Fresko Madra

Tue | 7PM

Please join us for a conversation centered on the multidisciplinary practice of İz Öztat, Swiss Institute’s SAHA artist-in-residence, with scholar Lara Fresko Madra. This conversation, which departs from Öztat and Fresko Madra’s rich intellectual exchange over the years, will touch on the artistic methodologies that Öztat has articulated, individually and collaboratively, in attempting to address state violence in Turkey. Fresko Madra, an art historian, will elaborate her explorations of these related themes through her writing and research. This event marks Öztat’s residency at SI as part of a newly established partnership with SAHA Association.

Together, they will reflect on Öztat’s individual and collaborative explorations of water—its linguistic, cultural, and material imaginaries—as well as recent water protection movements and the layered histories carried across waterways. They will also discuss new research directions that Öztat has undertaken during her residency.

The talk will situate Öztat’s practice within both historical and contemporary contexts of state violence in Turkey and broader geopolitical dynamics following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. As Fresko Madra writes in a recent essay on Öztat’s work, “the artist locates and articulates the physical and epistemic violence of modernity, particularly as it indexes community, conscience, and ecology from the late 19th century to the present.”

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

İz Öztat’s collective and individual artistic practice, spanning diverse media defined by research, explores the persistence of violent histories through forms, materials, space and language. Öztat is a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Programme (2024-25). Her academic articles, essays and fictional texts have been published in various media. She has worked at the intersection of art and education in self-organized, institutional, and academic settings. Selected exhibitions include Self-determination: A Global Perspective, IMMA, Dublin (2023); The Colony, Schwules Museum, Berlin (2018); Tamawuj, Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); Land without Land, Heidelberger Kunstverein, (2016); and Salt Water: A Theory on Thought Forms, 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015).

Lara Fresko Madra is an Assistant Professor and Luma Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, where she is part of the core faculty. Her research and teaching articulates anti-hegemonic notions of time, citation, and imagination in contemporary art.

SAHA Association was founded to support artists, curators, and writers working in visual arts from Turkey in improving their production and development environments, and to enhance their interactions with international art institutions and networks. Since 2011, SAHA has supported over 650 different artists, curators, writers, and art initiatives for their projects in museums, biennials and non-profit art organizations in 50 countries.

Image: İz Öztat, Constituting an Island, 2014. Video Still. Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Istanbul | Berlin.