Mk’s practice is an ongoing research project under the name “mikaye” which is a schizoplane where the fictional personas, including Mk, are interconnected. In mikaye, personas live and produce together. Although they may have different names; none of them has a clear, fixed appearance, mode of production and identity. They like to flow into each other, to dive from one part of the plane and come out of another persona, sometimes to stay in the depths for months, and being thought to have disappeared.
Mk received BA and MA degrees in Architecture from ITU; and Proficiency in Art (PhD) degree from YTU. Mk, who were accepted to Central Saint Martins MFA Program, participated in The Artist Residency Project of SVA NYC School of Visual Arts with the artist fellowship award of American Turkish Society in 2021. In 2025, ran workshops on performance art at Universidade Lusofona di Lisboa. Mk continues their artistic / academic practices in collaboration with Performistanbul and at Haliç University.
UNVEIL
UNVEIL is a speculative research and production process that approaches live art practices as a database and a field of inquiry, advancing through posthuman relations between body and space. The project considers art collections and archives not as fixed repositories of knowledge, but as dynamic structures that can be reread, transformed, and opened up to new forms of production. The first phase of UNVEIL, whose second phase took place at SAHA Studio, was realized in 2024 as a five month research process within The Artist Book Collection BAS.
At the conclusion of the BAS process, twenty four new works were produced at the intersection of different media such as bio art, food art, new media art, performative presentation, and spatial intervention. These works were activated through participatory performances over a period of three weeks. The process was documented through a single copy artist book created with Mk Yurttaş’s handwriting and drawings, alongside an open source online document*. This dual structure offers, on the one hand, a relatively objective and theoretical selection, and on the other, traces of the artist’s subjective process of thinking, writing, and drawing.
In its second phase at SAHA Studio, UNVEIL approached SAHA’s annual reports from 2011 to 2024 as a database. The PDF reports downloaded from SAHA’s website were scanned using three keywords related to live art and posthuman thought. PERFORM for performance and performativity, BODY for corporeality and embodiment, and HUMAN for posthuman and nonhuman concepts. Starting from 2011, separate online journals were kept for each keyword. In parallel with this textual research, a new artist book shaped by the artist’s handwriting and drawings emerged.
As a third layer added to these two intertwined processes of inquiry, sound and image recordings derived from the artist’s relationships with studio peers and university practice were incorporated. In this way, UNVEIL formed a multilayered research field in which immaterial textual tracing, material tactility, and temporal performative records intersect.
“WE”
As the reports approach the year 2024, concepts such as collectivity, togetherness, negotiation, and interaction appear increasingly entangled among the examined art projects. Especially around the keyword performance, collective practices in public space and alternative forms of togetherness stand out. The public walk based performances of Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Ahmet Öğüt, and Güneş Terkol, the alternative modes of togetherness proposed in the performative works of Fatma Bucak and Sena Başöz, and the ethical and critical approaches of Elmas Deniz and Burcu Yağcıoğlu focusing on interspecies negotiation all contribute to the emergence of this plural tone. This plurality becomes embodied through the overlap between a holiday the artist spent in Antalya and the public atmosphere of İMÇ, mediated by yellow and white striped fabrics. An outdoor fabric sourced from İMÇ is installed in the space as a ten meter surface that circulates inside and outside the studio, is sat on, touched, and continuously changes form. Together with chairs, ropes, spools, and small objects, the fabric is conceived as a new materialist environment that invites viewer participation. Under the title “WE,” this environment aims to experiment with a form of togetherness that is not human centered.
Rather than proposing a fixed collective identity, the concept of “WE” investigates a posthuman mode of coexistence in which all elements, both living and nonliving, are included as actants. This experience within the studio was later extended into public space through performances that moved into the corridors of IMC. The ten meter fabric strip opened up to new relations through performances multiplied by environmental factors and chance encounters.
Following the SAHA Studio Midterm Gathering presentations, the simplification of the studio space triggered a new phase of the project. In this phase, Mk Yurttaş reconsidered performativity through the temporary balances of objects, their potential to fall, and their processes of reconfiguration. Stacked chairs, metal legs, MDF panels, and ladders were approached not as sculptural or permanent forms, but as metastable corporealities in constant negotiation. In performances, all these elements proposed states of being living matter within a metastable temporality. This approach was shaped around the concept of metastability, which expresses a state of not being fully stable nor fully unstable.
These performative relations established with everyday and ordinary materials also align with other artistic practices highlighted in the SAHA reports. Ali Kazma’s understanding of the material body, Leman Darıcıoğlu’s works that question anthropomorphic assumptions, CANAN’s fantastic creatures, and Evrim Kavcar’s bodily propositions were read as examples that resonate with the distributed posthuman tendencies within Mk Yurttaş’s process.
In conclusion, UNVEIL transforms the theoretical and archival research that began at BAS into a more fluid, entangled, and nonlinear production process at SAHA Studio. Theory, analysis, material, affect, and performance progress without separating from one another, while temporality and transience become central axes of the project. This process reactivates the artist’s multiple personas and collaborations; positioning UNVEIL as an open ended and plural research field within posthuman performance art.
*For the open-source version of the artist book produced during the BAS process:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uv09nDngdMNaDNCqvyqXVEqAUkxGn_Ipg7cVaCY4gL0/edit?tab=t.0
