Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin

This promise could lie in the name of a cheap hotel offering the experience of a distant place, or in the branding of a mass-produced product unconvincingly simulating luxury or exoticism. Alptekin was an artist who saw the profound effects of global capitalism on everyday life, observing the movement of people and products across geographies, particularly in the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He himself was also a traveller, studying forms of feral capitalism surging from places considered the fringes of Western modernity. It is the signifiers and remnants of all this—the traces of the burgeoning effects of mobility, trade, and image circulation—that Alptekin used as materials for his art-making, as a means of contemplating what it all represented.

Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin studied at University of Paris. The recorded working language is Turkish. Employment is recorded with Istanbul Bilgi University. Work by Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin is recorded in the collections of Tate, Museum of Modern Art and Van Abbemuseum.

Alptekin worked as a photographer for SIPA Press and wrote for various publications as an art and design critic. Alptekin lectured at Ankara Bilkent University and Istanbul Bilgi University. Starting in the early 1990s, Alptekin focused on an artistic production that explored the effects of globalisation, immigration, and exile, cross-cultural image circulation and anonymous production through travel, personal histories, and archives. He participated in many local and international panels and symposia on contemporary art. Starting in the early 1990s, Alptekin focused on an artistic production that explored the effects of globalisation, immigration and exile, cross-cultural image circulation and anonymous production through travel, personal histories and archives. His cross‐referential work, consisting of photo‐installations, collages, videos, objects, and once a life‐size truck overloaded with colorful plastic soccer balls, represent a multi‐layered, complex visual language. In 2007, he represented Turkey in the 52nd Venice Biennial with his installation “Don't Complain.” That same year he participated in the exhibition “Global Cities” at the Tate Modern in London. From 2000 to 2004, he ran a non-profit artists' collective called “Sea Elephant Travel Agency” (SETA) that hosted a residency program for artists as well as organized conferences. He was a man of collective and collaborative work; his early collaborations with Michael Morris, his collective work with students “Grup Grip-in” during his years in Bilkent, the meetings he arranged at his space “LOFT,” the “Bunker Research Group” and “Barn Research Group” are just a few of his many accomplishments. The artist's solo exhibitions are “Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin – Facts, Incidents, Accidents, Circumstances, Situations”, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2013), “Festival Istambul Agora – Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin,” SESC Pompeia, São Paulo (2013), “I Am Not A Studio Artist”, Salt, İstanbul (2011), “Global Mockery,” Maison de Folie de Wazemmes, Lille (2009) and “Kriz: Viva Vaia,” Dulcinea Gallery, İstanbul (1999). Exhibitions he participated in include 2nd and 3rd Tirana Biennial (2003, 2005); the Istanbul Biennial (1995, 2005, 2009); Manifesta 5, San Sebastián (2004); “How Latitudes Become Forms,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2003); Cetinje Biennial (2002), for which he won the UNESCO Prize; the São Paulo Biennial (1998).