Genco Gülan

Genco Gülan — Biography

Moving between painting, sculpture, new media and performance, Genco Gülan works as both a conceptual artist and an art theorist. He describes what he does as "idea art", a way of probing where technology, identity, society and culture meet. His pieces have been shown from the Pera Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro to ZKM Karlsruhe and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and he is also known as the founder of the Web Biennial.

He began producing conceptual and media-based work in the early 1990s and in 1997 set up the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum (iS.CaM) as an independent art project, which later moved onto the internet and ran exhibitions and workshops. He has worked with robots in university labs since the mid-1990s: his piece Robots, Football and War became part of the computer game Balkan Wars, which won an award at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück in 1995. Later came kinetic marble statues, AI-generated images and plays, the installation The Great Conjugation built from about a thousand ties, and the exhibitions Antik Gelecek (2017) and Picasso'dan Sonra (2018). In 2021 he started the series Modern Sanat Bitti, which turns to unconventional venues.

He studied political science and art at Boğaziçi University and took a master's degree in media studies at The New School in New York. He has received awards from BP, Lions and EMAF, and was a finalist for the Sovereign European Art Prize in 2011. He lives and works in Istanbul and teaches at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and Boğaziçi University.