Serkan Özkaya (born 1973) is a Turkish and American conceptual artist whose work deals with topics of appropriation and reproduction.
Özkaya's artworks are held in the permanent collections of the İstanbul Modern, Borusan Contemporary Art, and Arter in Istanbul, as well as three different 21c Museum Hotels locations—Louisville, Kentucky; Bentonville, Arkansas; and Nashville, Tennessee.
[3] In 2001, he published Genius and Creativity in the Arts, a comparative study of the German works Moses und Aron (an opera by Arnold Schoenberg), Doctor Faustus (a novel by Thomas Mann) and Die Philosophie der Neuen Musik (a book by Theodor W.
[6] Often, the letters do not deserve a response but curiously, they have usually been treated with official but unthinking courtesy, read perhaps but not comprehended—answered and then often passed along the bureaucratic chain.
Among them was Proletarier Aller Laender (1998-2009) or Proletariat of all Countries, as it is also known in English, a collection of red plastic foam figurines glued to the floor.
[8] Other works in the exhibition included the golden sculptures Levitation by Defecation (2008), Shit on a Stick (2008), and Goldenboy (2006), "a fiberglass figure painted in gold acrylic and dangling a couple of feet off the ground by a noose".
[citation needed] In early 2004, it was part of a group exhibition named "The Poetics of Proximity" at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University.
The overall piece, entitled Today Could Be A Day Of Historical Importance was executed in Sweden with Aftonbladet, in Germany with Freitag,[5] and in the US with The New York Times and The Courier-Journal.
Özkaya created two new versions of the replica at a studio in Eskişehir, one of which was to be placed in the local Sazova Science, Art and Culture Park.
Although just a mere copy, the statue made quite a spectacle, as the artist intended, attracting the attention of tourists and residents as it was transported uncovered lying horizontally on a semi-trailer truck.
This work was made in collaboration with M on the Bund in Shanghai,[26] offered at Freemans' Restaurant in New York in 2007 as a part of the Performa Biennial,[27][28] at Changa in Istanbul in 2008, as street food in İzmir in 2009,[citation needed] at Capital M in Beijing in 2012,[29] and at the Hive in Bentonville, Arkansas in 2014.
[citation needed] An Attempt at Exhausting A Place… is a series of works in which the artist "dissolves the white cube" and the usual constraints of a traditional art space.
[38][39] Atlas (2011) is a contribution to a walking museum wherein Özkaya constructed a rock to be strapped to the curator's back and promenaded daily throughout the streets of New York.
[41] Mirage (2013) was installed at the Postmasters Gallery in New York and consisted of a shadow of a passenger airplane that crossed the room for 45 seconds every four minutes.
The work was also exhibited as part of the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection's Overture: New Acquisitions (2015) at Perili Köşk in Istanbul.