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Through a range of diverse collaborative relationships with artists and curators, Subtitled NYC
presents interdisciplinary practices through exhibitions.
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The Seeker & The Imposter

03.01 - 04.22.2024

Baris Gokturk


The Seeker & The Imposter, Baris Gokturk’s solo exhibition at Subtitled NYC, constructs an environment of parallel play in the gallery space through a combination of drawing, painting and sculpture. The two inter-connecting works in the show, one on the floor, the other on the wall, reference the transformative states of the body on a plane of domestic mythology. A series of framing devices, both conceptual and physical, further extends this context of speculative potentiality.

Interested in transpositions and the way the shape-shifting possibilities within the aesthetic language can relate to a potential for realignment in the political realm, Gokturk sets in motion clashing states of the body through a layered materiality. Gokturk’s works at large reconstruct two-dimensional historical documents, photographs and archival imagery about events or individuals acting within or re-acting against dominant paradigms of power in three-dimensional layers, hybrid fragments and installations that oscillate between drawing, painting and sculpture.

The scale relation between the individual body and the larger body-politic, in the way each influences, internalizes, provokes and corrupts the other is also where personal and political mythologies cross over, resulting in charged ambiguities.

-Text by Helene Bugra


Baris Gokturk is a Turkish artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in sculpture. Recent museum projects include SECCA in Winston-Salem, The Jewish Museum in New York, The Frost Art Museum in Miami, and Pera Museum in Istanbul. He also completed public commissions by Columbia University’s Butler Library and The Public Art Fund in New York.

Gokturk has shown his work in the United States and internationally in Germany, Spain, France, Korea, Turkey and Puerto Rico. His solo exhibitions Public Secret (2020) and Scanner/Tarayan (2023) were on view at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York and Galeri Bosfor in Istanbul. His work has been featured in Artforum, The BOMB Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail among others. He was an ApexArt fellow in Seoul, artist-in-residence at YADDO, LMCC and ISCP, a participant in SOMA Mexico as well as at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

In addition to his MFA from Columbia University in sculpture, he also holds an MFA in painting from Hunter College where he taught for seven years. He currently teaches at The New School and runs an art program for NYEP, part of Johns Hopkins University’s neurology department.

From 2011-2015, he ran with a group of artists a gallery and project space called Heliopolis in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He is the co-founder of Junte, an arts and culture project in Puerto Rico currently being incubated at The New Museum’s NEW INC.


                                                                                                                                                 * poem by Jason Grabowski

*Baris Gokturk in conversation with Hae Won Sohn

All photos courtesy of Subtitled NYC, New York