Ulufer Çelİk Studio

HI FROM ROTTERDAM I’M ULUFER ÇELIK FROM TURKEY AND I’M ALAA ABU ASAD FROM PALESTINE WE STARTED WORKING ON THIS BOOK IN 2016 WHEN WE FIRST MET AND BECAME FRIENDS. THE BOOK IS ABOUT COMMON WORDS BETWEEN TURKISH AND PALESTINIAN ARABIC, AND IT CONTAINS DRAWING AND STORIES OF THESE WORDS. IT'S A SPECIAL PROJECT FOR US BECAUSE WE CREATED THIS BOOK AS AN ACTIVISTS’ TOOL. THE BOOK IS NOT A FINISHED WORK OR A FINAL OBJECT, BUT IT IS A DIALOGUE STARTER. THE BOOK IS ALSO ABOUT THE ORAL HISTORY OF THE TWO LANGUAGES WHICH IS USUALLY FORGOTTEN AND IS NOT REGISTERED. THE BOOK NEVER AIMS TO BE ONE FINAL RESULT…AND WE HAVE INVOLVED IT IN ART EXHIBITIONS, WORKSHOPS, PERFORMANCES, AUDIO AND VIDEO INSTALLATIONS, WHICH WE WOULD LIKE TO CONTINUE DOING. WITH THIS AWARD WE WOULD LIKE TAKE THE BOOK PHYSICALLY TO OTHER GEOGRAPHIES WHERE IT CAN FUNCTION IN REAL LIFE. IN BETWEEN PLACES CUT BY BARRIERS, BORDERS AND CAMPS. WE WOULD LIKE TO SHARE THE COMMON WORDS AND THE DRAWINGS WITH PEOPLE AND KIDS IN MORYA REFUGEE CAMP IN GREECE AND AKÇAKALE TENT CAMP IN TURKEY. THIS AWARD WILL HELP US TO ACHIEVE THIS. PLEASE VOTE FOR OUR BOOK SO WE CAN MAKE THIS HAPPEN...

Shimmer (Rotterdam) and PUBLICS (Helsinki) present Across The Way With... an informal online reading aloud program on intimacy in the public domain. ABOUT ACROSS THE WAY WITH... In Lauren Berlant’s essay ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue’, she tells us that everyone thinks they know how to do intimacy, but it is something that is quickly misinterpreted. Intimacy is troubling, fleeting, and challenging to speak about— and more especially to enact. Shimmer and PUBLICS explore intimacy’s obscurity by welcoming words of artists, poets, philosophers, curators, and others from Finland, The Netherlands and around the world. To bring our guests and audience together through the subject of intimacy in a time where racism, war, and greed infiltrates our lives, public intimacy becomes a political act of openness. We intend to challenge intimacy and go beyond the conventional understanding of intimacy as ‘only’ the ‘personal’. Instead, the program considers intimacy as a means to re-think the community and how ‘we’ modern humans in a digitized society engage in the care of one another. ABOUT ULUFER ÇELIK & ALAA ABU ASAD Do you know what şemsiye means? Do you use the word kırbaç for a whip? For around three years, we have been asking each other about identical words used in both of our languages: Turkish and (vernacular) Palestinian Arabic. It is a process that can last for good – as long as our friendship lives. We spend time together uttering words that are held in common and draw them, discovering whether they carry the same meaning, are slightly different, or are false friends. Alaa Abu Asad is an artist, researcher, and photographer. His practice is centred around developing and experiencing alternative trajectories where values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding intersect. Ulufer Çelik (b. in 1992, TR) finished Bachelor of Architecture at Bilgi University in Istanbul and holds a MA from the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. She works with film, sound, poetry and performance. Her work was recently shown in ‘Fresh Myths, Different Times’ Exhibition in collaboration with Merve Kilicer at Corridor Project Space, ‘Sleeping with Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life’ Exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart, 2020), ‘B’ Exhibition at Belmacz Gallery(London, 2019), ‘Quintessential Pirateness in the Age of Konijneneiland a.k.a. Coney Island Adventures’ at Rib (Rotterdam, 2019). She has participated in group shows at Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Vienna 2019), the Institute for Provocation (Beijing 2018), Litost Gallery (Prag, 2019), YellowBrick Gallery (Athens,2018). Çelik lives and works in Rotterdam. ABOUT SHIMMER Shimmer is a Rotterdam based exhibition space that operates with an ever-changing studio-like mentality where knowledge arises through participation and experimentation. Shimmer is a momentary flash of light and an ever-changing space where practitioners, thinkers, audience, and entities are brought together in the spirit of care and companionship. We are influenced by anthropologist and feminist theorist Deborah Bird Rose’s talk ‘Shimmer, when all you love is being trashed.’ Her learning pushes us to be humbled to pay attention and to listen. In this way, we hope the artworks and the multifaceted others gather and stretch across and over time. We hope to provide the breathing room for these entities to share space and time with us. Alongside the exhibitions, are programs such as our events program Sunday Mornings with and the online mixtape On the Waves with… and online listening program Across the Way with... to move into both the personal and the public space. IN @shimmer_rotterdam FB @shimmerrotterdam W www.shimmershimmer.org ABOUT PUBLICS PUBLICS is a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Vallila Helsinki, known for its industrial working class histories and, more recently, for its influx of divergent artistic and academic communities. Under the artistic direction of curator Paul O’Neill, with program manager and curator Eliisa Suvanto, PUBLICS explores a “work together” institutional model with multiple overlapping objectives, thematic strands and collaborations. PUBLICS is a constellation of practices, projects and productions. As such, PUBLICS proposes the term “Public” as always plural—as a concept; as a group of people (imagined, actualized or real); and as a contested spatio-temporal location/discourse in the world. The on-going project strands of PUBLICS are: PUBLICS Library; PUBLICS Talks; and PUBLICS Events and Performances. These initiatives will evolve in time and in parallel with the project’s longer-term curatorial programmes, PUBLICS Public Art Commissions. IN @publicsfi FB @Publicsfi W www.publics.fi