Independent Curatorial Projects
Trembling in Every Direction
⌖ I curated a duo exhibition featuring works of Nina Kuttler and Natasha Tontey held at Sanatorium (Istanbul, TR) between March 18 – April 24, 2022. The exhibition explored the plurality of approaches towards technology through the non-human embodiment of knowledge in anthropocentric environments. Its title references the work of Édouard Glissant who proposed “tremblement”, or “trembling thinking” as an instinct to refuse categories imposed by imperial thought and systems of terror, by embracing the inextricability of ourselves from the world; a call to tremble along with it. With fiction as a method of speculative thinking at the core of both artists’ practices, the exhibition proposes a practice of approaching technologies based on artifacts, anecdotes and archives that entwine history with the fictive in various pathways of knowledge production.

⌖ From the Curator’s Note, ‘Art is Technology: When the Fascination Shivers’:
I am proposing to think of art not only at the intersection of technology — here, there is no spotlight on new media art practices often at the centre of “art x tech” initiatives — but art as a technology, the stick which we stick into the soil for ants to crawl up towards us, so that we may each be closer to one another.
⌖ Read the full essay: link.
⌖ Press release: EN / TR


Photos by Zeynep Fırat, Sanatorium

The Complex Relationship Between Two Simple Machines + Death, Infinity and Zero



Album art by Ruben Ramos Balsa

‘Physics’ is not introduced as a conceptual overlay or metaphor here, but a counter-interpretation of improvised music as has been theorized, annexed and marketed as of the ‘jazz’ tradition. More fundamentally, improvisation is pursued as a study of interaction, technique, (dis)order, space and time.

⌖ Full essay: link.
⌖ Press release & credits: link.
⌖ Listen: Spotify | Apple
⌖ Released May 21, 2023.

⌖ In 2022, my practice expanded into a new field: avant-garde music. Working closely with the pianist and composer Armen Nalbandian, who by this point was devising what would follow his previous twenty albums, I stepped into the role of co-producer with the question: how to create music of the highest technical and conceptual calibre, but trapped neither by the dogma of tradition nor counter-tradition?

The first collaboration whose records I co-produced was between Armen, Dave King and Chris Speed. Omitting the bass in an atypical piano-drums-saxaphone/clarinet configuration, the ensemble creates a poetic and cinematic offering that rethinks the possibilities of the genre.

The two records were spontaneously composed. I contributed in aspects of conceptual development, writing, marketing, planning and strategy.





Album art by Jing Yi Teo

 Presence is betrayed by its own articulation; as soon as ‘now’ is uttered it has already passed. Is the sound that reverberates the sound that dwells in the air, or in memory? If it’s not remembered, may it be forgotten over and over again. Before sound there was silence, but when the old man speaks — he mouths sounds, says things — but when he speaks, a word is born — 
farewell. 


⌖ Press release & credits: link.
⌖ Listen: Spotify | Apple
⌖ Released December 8, 2023.

A Spontaneous Breaking of Symmetry
⌖ The second music collaboration that I co-produced was between Armen Nalbandian and Chris Corsano. It takes the form of a triptych, and draws from Andrei Tarkovsky’s concept of “sculpting in time” to frame spontaneous composition anew.

From the press release:
The piano-drums duo is re-sculpted here in sound, concept and structure, as Corsano’s polyrhythmic, kaleidoscopic delivery meets Nalbandian’s emotive touch and vividly inventive phrasing. Through cyclicality, continuity and fractality, the recording is a study of sound not as expression but as a system for unraveling time.
Part I and Part II was released in September 2023 and March 2024, respectively.

Part I (2023)
⌖ Press release & credits: link.
⌖ Listen: Spotify | Apple

Part II (2024)
⌖ Press release & credits: link.
⌖ Listen: Spotify | Apple

Part III (2024)
⌖ Press release & credits: link.
⌖ Listen: Spotify | Apple


HORIZONS⌖ For Singapore Art Week 2022, I produced a program commissioned by the National Arts Council, Singapore, a massive curatorial collaboration between SO-FAR, virtual wellness platform AORA and art consultancy Metis Art.

HORIZONS was a 24-hour journey through the possibilities of art, technology and business, traversing timezones throughout the world with a programme that included studio visits, virtural retreats, readings, audio-visual experiences, curator presentations, DJ sets and more.

The program featured a contributors list of leading artists, curators and thinkers including: Benedicta M Badia-Nordenstahl, Gerhard Marx, K Allado-McDowell, Shumon Basar, Lawrence Lek, Shiraz Bayjoo, Harm van den Dorpel, Fatoş Üstek, Barbara Pollack, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Edgar Calel and Jakob Kudsk Steensen.

⌖ Site archive & full program: link.

Image credit: AORA, SO-FAR