Elif Öner, currently lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Dichotomies like reality/fiction and nature/culture are major concepts in Öner’s artwork and research towards their visual language. Focusing the themes of self-perception and unwritten history, Öner uses the potential of the unconscious to research the unspoken in her artworks. Since 2018, Öner has been working with Evrim Kavcar, collaborating on a long-term project called Dictionary of Sensitive Sounds, a polyphonic, multiform, participatory process that traces the subjective, social and cultural layers of sound in multiple formats.
Her solo and duo exhibitions include 17th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2022); The Fine Knife We Used To Pare Away The Rough Day, Kasa Galeri, Istanbul, Turkey (2020); Dictionary of Sensitive Sounds, PASAJist, Istanbul, Turkey (2019); MuseuMModern, website project, Turkey, Germany (2010-2014); You Already Know Half Of The Story, artSümer, Istanbul, Turkey (2013); Out of Frame, TAB Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey (2018). Her selected group exhibitions include Formless, Santral Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey (2014); Fluid Reality in New Media Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Serbia (2015); Upside Down, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Serbia (2016) and I Haven’t Taken An Oath, Barın Han, Istanbul, Turkey (2022). Öner also worked as a visual artist in a theater play Eurotopia directed by Emre Koyuncu and staged at Freiburg Government Theatre, Freiburg, Germany in 2017.
Evrim Kavcar (Istanbul) has an undergraduate degree from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Sculpture Department (2000), a master’s degree from San Francisco Art Institute with a Fulbright fellowship (2003), and a Proficiency in Art degree from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (2011). Kavcar worked with Harun Farocki and Maren Grimm on photo-film and Thomas Renoldner on animation at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2010-2011). She has been teaching theory and studio classes in the Mardin Artuklu University Fine Arts Faculty since 2013. She focuses on the bizarre and fragile encounters in everyday life, and is interested in the contradictions inherent to witnessing and contact. Working on moments that get stuck in the mind like a fishbone activates a memory between the personal and the social. It enables forays into spaces and layers of memory through literature at the intersection of the poetic and the political, blending fiction into documentation. The artist enjoys making layered installations, using different techniques such as sculpture, sound, pattern, writing and animation concurrently. In her most recent work, she has utilized linguistic, historical and archeological elements to build narratives which explore the silent witnessing of the earth.
Evrim Kavcar took part in the Berlin Guest Artist Program 2018 and has had a number of exhibitions including “The Yellow Section’’, after the butcher, Berlin (2019); “On Performing Multiples”, Feminist Media Studio, Montreal (2019); “Dictionary of Sensitive Sounds”, PASAJ, Istanbul (2019); “Contact”, REM Art Space, Istanbul (2018); “You Are Here”, ARTE Sanat, Ankara (2017); “Hidden in Lost”, Karşı Sanat Çalışmaları, Istanbul (2016); “SiS Collective”, Apartment Project, Berlin (2016); “D as in Void”, Galeri Zilberman, Istanbul (2015); 5th International Sinop Biennial (2014). The artist lives and works in Istanbul and Mardin.