# Genco Gulan

Genco Gülan (Turkish pronunciation:, born 13 January 1969) is a conceptual artist and theorist who lives and works in Istanbul. His multidisciplinary work includes painting, found objects, new media, drawings, sculpture, photography, performance, and video.
Gülan studied Media at The New School, New York. His art has appeared in Pera Museum, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, ZKM Karlsruhe, Triennale di Milano, Biennial of Tehran, and Pompidou Center Paris. Gülan has had solo shows at the Gallery Arts in Berlin, Istanbul; State Painting and Sculpture Museums in Ankara, Izmir; Foto Gallery Lang, Zagreb; and Artda Gallery, Seoul.

## Art

Gülan is a new media artist who uses text, codes and his own DNA in his art. In a video piece called Tele-rugby, he filmed a female swim team playing rugby underwater with a TV monitor.
His experimental works include net art, web art, AI generated images, Robot Games, SCIgen papers and online videos. Gülan uses boron in his sculptures.

## Works

The Android Statue and sketches of Gülan's kinetic marble statue series, Robotic Statues were presented at the Antalya Museum in 2014. Gülan's work with robots in university labs since the mid-1990s has influenced many of his art projects. His artwork Robots, Football and War (RFW) was part of the computer game Balkan Wars, which won an award at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück in 1995. His AI-generated play was used in the project YEN! (New) presented at the Pera Museum for the 16th Istanbul Theatre Festival.
The Great Conjugation was exhibited at Boğaziçi University's Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences building, Washburn Hall, in 2014. The installation used approximately 1,000 ties of various colors, designs, and brands to create a route spanning all five floors of the building. Viewers were invited to bring their ties to contribute to the installation. The installation was also displayed at the Thessaloniki State Museum of Contemporary Art and the Ankara Contemporary Art Center in 2013. In 2011, Gülan was a finalist for the Sovereign Art Foundation European Art Prize and held his first exhibition at the White Saloon inside the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences building, where he studied Political Science and International Relations from 1987 to 1991.
An exhibition titled Swimming Rocks was held in 2014, at Gallery Metazori in Çeşme, Alaçatı, where Gülan spent much of his childhood. The work was inspired by pumice rocks that float on water, found in the Aegean Sea around Çeşme and Alaçatı. Works by his mother, Tezer Gülan, and his grandmother, Saime İzmiroğlu, were also featured in the exhibition. Additionally, Gülan presented his New Landscape series, an interpretation of landscapes as barcodes, and his Digital Ghost series, which involved painting images from his laptop onto large canvases.

## Museum

Gülan established the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum as an art project in 1997.
   "At first the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum developed as an art series in the manner of Duchamp and Broodthaers until the end of the 1990s. Later it evolved when it was transferred to the Internet. It turned into a new age institution that organized exhibitions, workshops and provided logistic support on cyber space."
For almost a decade, the museum ran a residency program called "I live in a Museum" and hosted artists from the U.S., the Netherlands, Spain, and China at its Galata location.
Gülan's monograph, Conceptual Colors of Genco Gülan edited by Marcus Graf, is co-published by Revolver Publishing, Berlin in collaboration with Galeri Artist, Istanbul. His publications are available internationally at libraries such as the German National Library, SALT Research, the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University.
Gülan founded the Web Biennial at the turn of the century, served on the Board of Balkan Biennial in Thessaloniki, International Programming Committee of ISEA Singapore in 2008 and was a guest editor for Second Nature: International Journal of Creative Media. He was on the jury for Turgut Pura Art Prize in Izmir and teaches at Mimar Sinan Academy and Boğaziçi University.

## Selected images

* Pompidou, From the "I love You series", C-print, Paris, 2007
* 'Magic Beans' 2013. Sculpture with 600 used neckties and a crane, 150m.
* Art (Blue), ready-made, 2013.
* 33.3 QR Code poem