Rıfat Şahiner

Rıfat Şahiner (born Ankara, 1969) is a Turkish artist. and academician. He is a professor of Fine Arts at the Combined Arts Department, Yildiz Technical University. Şahiner's current research and teaching focuses on posthumanism, Interdisciplinary arts, new media art and theory, and post-structuralism. Şahiner has taken part in many group exhibitions as well as 11 solo oneshttps://web.archive.org/web/20140330235850/http://egeart.ege.edu.tr/index.php?lid=1&SayfaID=1342&cat=details. He is an author of books on postmodernism and contemporary art, and has published more than 90 articles on modernism, postmodernism, post-structuralism and contemporary art in various journals since 1995. Sahiner has also participated in many national and international congress and symposiums and gave conferences. 
Şahiner has taken part in the organization of an important contemporary art events like "Young Art in Ankara-3" in 2000 and also curated the “Ambigious Situations” in 2010 and “Words and Things” in 2013https://www.e-skop.com/duyuru/kelimeler-ve-seyler-words-and-things-20-31-mayis-2013/299. 
==Art Works==
Focusing on mixed media in his works, Şahiner turned to public space applications in 1995. He focused on critically bringing the media, which has been on Turkey's agenda more effectively since the early 1990s, to the agenda in the artist's performance titled Sensation in Kurtuluş Park. In his installation Medya Tipi Tüketim Modeli (A Model for Mediatic Consumption), which he performed on Sakarya Street in the same year, he opened up the masses, which were bombarded with information by the media, the discussion over the images and commodities spread by the consumer society. In Medyatik Sağanak (Mediatic Downpour), his first solo painting exhibition he opened in Ankara State Painting and Sculpture Museum in 1996, he again focused on the processes of violence, kitschization and manipulation spread by the mediahttps://resimheykelm.gazi.edu.tr/view/page/293025/rifat-sahiner. Sahiner's painting series titled Ardışık Dizgeler (Visual Sequences), in which he critizes the standardizing and conditioning visual language of television since 1998 and focuses on the similarity or contrast of images flowing, sliding and distorted in symmetrical structures, aroused great interest in the exhibitions he opened in Ankara, İzmir and Eskişehir]https://sergirehberi.com/m/artist_detay.aspx?gorsel=1&a_id=3088&q1=-Gorseller&q=Rifat-Sahinerhttps://www.istanbul.net.tr/etkinlik/sergi/rifat-sahiner-ardisik-terminaller-/3245/15https://web.archive.org/web/20150220225330/http://www.dijimecmua.com/dekorasyon-dunyasi-dergisi/5382/index/1101539_rifat-sahiner-in-ardisik-terminaller-adli-kisisel-sergisi-rifat-sahiner-kimdir/. Between 2001 and 2006, the artist created a series of paintings titled Icono Cosmos. In this process, he carried the faces he described as the icons of popular culture to his works and interpreted the colorful faces of the billboards, advertisements and magazines on the canvas. In these works, Şahiner problematized how similar consumption patterns, which cannot be seen from living in it, and whose relationships cannot be easily distinguished even if seen, make the culture shallow and condemn the individual of the consumption society to a monotonous taste. In the following years, the artist continued his pursuits with video performances, installations and mixed mediahttp://ebrunsulun.blogspot.com/2011/05/sanatoriumda-redejenerasyon.htmlhttps://www.mashallahnews.com/regeneration-degeneration/.
==Publications==
Since 1996, Rıfat Şahiner has written articles on art, postmodernism, popular culture and video aesthetics, both in international and national important art magazines and newspapers. Şahiner, whose many reviews, essays and critiques have been published in magazines that set the agenda of the art scene in Turkey such as Türkiye'de Sanat, Genç Sanat, Rh Sanart, Plato and Sanat Dünyamız, and newspapers such as Cumhuriyet and Radikal, published his first book titled Sanatta Postmodern Kırılmalar ya da Modernin Yapıbozumu (Postmodern Ruptures in Art or Deconstruction of Modernity) in 2008. In this book, Şahiner examines a series of concepts and phenomena that emerged in the art after 1960, presented the trends of the postmodernist understanding of art to the art environment with a rich content, starting from the prominant artists and theories that gave direction to this process. Sahiner's second book, Çağdaş Sanatta Temsiliyet Krizi (Representation Crisis in Contemporary Art) published by Ütopya Publishing at the beginning of 2015. In this book, Rıfat Şahiner approached the contemporary art world, which had been said to be in crisis for a long time, through a series of issues prevailing in this environment. He brought together many contemporary issues and discussions such as the new problems brought by globalization, the reflections of identity and gender issues in the field of art, postfeminism, queer theory, new media art and the relationship between art and technology, and the reasons for congestion in art criticism, with striking examples.. Şahiner is the editor of the books 'Çağdaş Sanatta Postmodernizm, Neo-Avangardizm ve Sinizm' (Postmodernism, Neo-Avant Gardism and Cynicism in Contemporary Art, Ütopya, 2020) and Sanatta Post-Nesne ve Post-İnsan (Post-Object and Post-Human in Art, Ütopya, 2020) in which he included the analyzes of many important texts on postmodernism and poststructuralism. 
Category:1969 births
Category:People from Ankara
Category:Turkish people
Category:Artists	
Category:Academicians