Podcast series 2025
Artist and IGBK delegate Nezaket Ekici in conversation with T. Melih Görgün, artist, curator, and founder of the biennial exhibition Sinopale in Sinop (TR).
© T. Melih Görgün, Nezaket Ekici/ IGBK
Preview image:
HAL Sinop Meeting Center, view from the roof during a public art event, 2023. Photo: Courtesy of Sinopale Archive.
The podcast series features interviews with European local artistic initiatives as part of the IGBK's 2025 annual project "Opening Space | Promoting Encounters."
About:
Nezaket Ekici (*1970 in Kırşehir, Turkey) is a visual artist working internationally with a focus on performance art. She lives and works in Berlin, Stuttgart and Istanbul. At the age of three, she emigrates with her family to Germany. She studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and earned a master's degree in art education at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Ekici was a master student of Marina Abramović in the field of performance at the Braunschweig University of Art.
Ekici has presented over 300 different performances and installations in more than 70 countries on four continents, in museums, galleries and biennials. In 2013/2014, she was a fellow at the Tarabya Cultural Academy in Istanbul and in 2020, she received the Cultural Exchange Fellowship of the State of Berlin (Visual Arts: ISCP New York). In 2021/22 she took part in the Artists-in-Residence Program at the Afrika Schlingensief Opera Village in Burkina Faso and in 2024 in the FSA (Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts) Artists-in-Residence Program in Charleston SC. 2016/17, Ekici received the Rome Prize of the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo and in 2018 the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Prize.
Ekici has been a member of the DKB (Deutscher Künstlerbund) since 2016 and of the Berufsverband Bildender Künstler*innen Berlin (bbk berlin) since 2023. She works as a volunteer on several committees and is a delegate of the Deutscher Künstlerbund in the IGBK.
T. Melih Görgün (Prof.) is an artist, curator, and academic. He was born in Sinop (TR) in 1962 and lives and works in Istanbul, Sinop and Berlin. His work operates at the intersection of art, urban research, and cultural studies, focusing in particular on research-based, participatory, and interdisciplinary curatorial practices.
He is professor emeritus at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul, where he taught for many years. He currently teaches there and at other universities in the fields of art in public space, cultural and social projects, social design, interdisciplinary design, and time-based artistic processes.
Görgün is the founder of Sinopale – International Sinop Biennial, which is internationally regarded as one of the most significant examples of participatory biennial formats and has developed a model for collaborative artistic production. In addition, he initiated and led the European Union-funded international educational cooperation project City and Art, which was implemented as the largest EU-supported art education project in Turkey.
He has participated in numerous international exhibitions, biennials, and conferences as a curator, artist, and speaker, and has published articles in national and international specialist publications. He also works as a consultant and lecturer for programs on contemporary art and curating.
