Within the last decades, art from Turkey and artists with a Turkish (migrational) background have become highly visible in the contemporary art scene. This book offers an insight to this production with texts by

Meltem Ahiska, Gudrun Ankele, Gülsen Bal, Emre Baykal, Ayşegül Baykan, Margrit Brehm, Dieter Buchhart, Levent Çalıkoğlu, Hafriyat, Barbara Heinrich, Natasa Ilic, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Nermin Saybaşılı, Başak Şenova, Necmi Sönmez, Pelin Tan, Jalal Toufic, xurban_collective and Daniela Zyman.

Tactics of Invisibility follow the traces of an aesthetic of the invisible and question its potential as a political tactic of intervening into societies that are structured around ready-made identity imperatives and a commodification of subjectivities. The exhibition is not a chronological survey of contemporary art in Turkey, but it brings together a variety of artistic positions from almost three decades yet not necessarily iconic works that mark the development of a local context. Instead it underlines a specific concern that links each individual artist’s production through common strategies of becoming or revealing the hidden, marginalized, repressed, and invisible in order to render certain realities visible.Tactics of Invisibility will include works from pioneering figures such as Sarkis , Füsun Onur , and Ayse Erkmen , whose earlier works and practices paved the way for a dynamic context for contemporary art in Turkey with the politically and socially engaged art practices of the 1990s, a critical period in which discourses such as multiculturalism, identity politics, migration, and minority politics came to the foreground. Even though the artistic practices of Inci Eviner , Kutlug Ataman and Hale Tenger have been nourished within this energetic and vibrant context, the exhibition avoids a tendency to represent certain periods with certain works and shows a broader interest in the more recent production of the participating artists, including the younger generation, represented by Cevdet Erek , Ali Kazma , Esra Ersen , Nilbar Güres , Nasan Tur , Nevin Aladag , Ahmet Ögüt , xurban_collective and the artist initiative Hafriyat .