Thinking Through Concepts in Contemporary Art

The SAHA Writing Series, launched by SAHA in 2019 to support independent art writers, continues in 2026 in collaboration with Orta Format, an art initiative that carries out independent publishing activities.

Orta Format is a collectively sustained platform that has been active since 2011, producing content on its digital platform (ortaformat.org) under the editorship of İpek Çınar, Şener Soysal, and Eda Yiğit. The essay series Thinking Through Concepts in Contemporary Art focuses on key concepts in contemporary art and cultural politics. Alongside intellectually enriching concepts such as agency, care work, autonomy, counter archive, and cultural colonialism, the series also addresses participatory art, practices of solidarity, survival skills, radical pedagogy, aesthetic politics, artistic expression, and methods and practices related to material. It brings together writers and cultural workers examining how concepts widely discussed in global literature resonate within contemporary art in Turkey, particularly when their equivalents in Turkish remain unsettled.