Nevin Aladağ
Pattern Kinship Mondrian, 2017 Waterjet cut aluminium, acrylic paint 51 1/5 × 51 1/5 × 2/5 in
Nevin Aladag’s multidisciplinary works explore the social and political borders of urban spaces and cultures, displaying a special focus on the role of sound in constructing an environment. Born in Turkey, Aladag, now based in Berlin, moved to Stuttgart as a child, which attuned her to the pluralism of experiences that dictate space and identities. “The experiences I had growing up in Germany made me look for new languages, connotations, displacements, breaking social and other boundaries by using metaphors and so on,” she has said. In her 2013 three-channel video Session, for example, the camera follows percussion instruments, which were selected as symbols of the city’s migrant communities, as they roll through the landscape of Sharjah. The landscape effectively plays the drum, symbolizing the distorted power relations between the Emirati city and its immigrant groups.
Turkish-German, b. 1972, Van, Turkey, based in Berlin, Germany courtesy of artsy.net