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Alper Turan
Curatorial Residency Program in Athens: May 2025
Alper Turan’s curatorial practice and research explore the intersections of state violence, censorship, and transnational queer resistance. Engaging critically with global cultural productions of HIV/AIDS, undetectable aesthetics, and the politics of visibility, his work investigates how art navigates the areas between text, body, and image within contested public spheres. Turan conceives the exhibition as an experimental laboratory, a space for collective knowledge-making and political action.
He was the 2023–24 Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York and the 2023–24 General Idea Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Currently an adjunct curator at Protocinema, Turan is also a founding member of STRÜKTÜR, a Berlin-based organization dedicated to transnational artistic exchange and support. Turan is pursuing a PhD in Art History at the University of Toronto.
His curatorial projects have been featured at institutions including Whitney ISP (NY), ArteEast & Wallach Gallery (NY), Slavs & Tatars’ Pickle Bar (Berlin) & Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), A Tale of a Tub (Rotterdam), Queer Museum & Volkskundemuseum (Vienna), Protocinema (İstanbul) and the 13th Sharjah Biennial. His writings have appeared in Texte Zur Kunst, November Magazine, Metropolis M, C Magazine, Artnet, and OnCurating.
During his residency in Athens, Alper Turan examined how far-right violence and repression resonate across Turkey, Greece, Germany, and the U.S., focusing on their impact on queer and dissident communities. Through collaborations with Athens-based artists and institutions, he explored collective strategies of survival and resistance, centering queer methodologies and transnational solidarity. His research aims to build curatorial frameworks that challenge dominant narratives and imagine shared, liberatory futures.
Alper Turan was in residence at ARTWORKS (Athens) from May 2 until June 13 2025.
On Monday, June 2, 2025, at 19:00, resident curator Alper Turan gave a public talk titled “Curating Undetectable” at the Institute for Contemporary Greek Art (ISET). More information available here.
Video: Nikoletta Zarifi
As part of the ARTWORKS Curatorial Residency, all the invited curators conclude their stay in Athens with a written reflection. These texts are shaped after conversing and engaging with the artists they meet through studio visits and exhibitions viewings. They serve as an extension of the residency, carrying forward the impressions collected and ideas developed while undertaking research in Athens, which eventually take a curatorial form in writing.
Alper Turan’s contribution, An Athenian Foursome: Sea, Sun, Disappearance, Sex, emerges directly from these encounters. A curator and writer whose practice moves across queer strategies, collective imagination, and speculative histories, Turan translates the city’s artistic landscape into four elemental prisms. The sea, the sun, disappearance, and sex become the lenses through which he reflects on the practices he connected with and the experiences that marked his time in Athens. His text proposes a layered reading of the city, where artworks, conversations, and lived moments interlace to generate new curatorial vocabularies.
Read the essay An Athenian Foursome: Sea, Sun, Disappearance, Sex by Alper Turan here.