SAHA supports 12 independent art initiatives from 9 different cities!

Since 2014, SAHA has been supporting independent art initiatives operating across Turkey with the SAHA Sustainability Fund. 

The initiatives that SAHA will support for various projects throughout 2025 are Arazi (Mardin), Fırın (Eskişehir), Hayy Open Space (İzmir), Hür Adalar (Alanya), Karantina (İzmir), Kırık (İstanbul), Loading (Diyarbakır), Montag Residency (Balıkesir), Poşe Art Space (İstanbul), Selektör Kolektif (Ankara), Tohum Art Initiative (İzmir), and Between Ruins Research and Art Initiative (İstanbul, Hatay, Diyarbakır, Mardin). 

The 12 initiatives were selected from the applications received to the open call in October 2024, and were prioritized and approved according to the mission and fields of activity of the association. Until the end of the year, SAHA will equally distribute 1,440,000 TL (approximately 40,000 EUR) of net and non-refundable funding to these 12 initiatives.

Arazi Assembly

Arazi consists of artists and researchers who have focused on various scales of spaces in the southeast region of Turkey since 2016. The artists and researchers of the Arazi Collective use artistic research methodologies within the field of critical spatial practices. The collective focuses on how a scale of infrastructure functions as an agency and its impact on the region as an agency and its impact on the region as an assemblage.

FIRIN

Founded in 2019 as a sub-unit of Eldem Art Space, Fırın is an interdisciplinary art platform based in Eskişehir. Focusing on the participatory, collaborative and solidarity role of art in social change processes, the platform opens up space for independent projects in the city, adopts a structure that enables process-oriented production and research, and aims to support innovative perspectives, experimentation and artistic freedom. Through invitations and applications, it prioritizes ideas and alternative perspectives that address current economic, ecological and social issues in its annual program.

Hayy Open Space

Hayy Open Space is an independent art space located in Piyaleoğlu Han, Kemeraltı, Izmir. It focuses on contemporary art and organizes exhibitions, performances, workshops, talks, readings, and listening events within collective thinking and production practices across different disciplines. It aims to create space not for consumption but for production, listening, and experience. Hayy Open Space fosters an environment where creative minds, collectives, initiatives, and producers from cities not considered cultural and artistic centers can come together. It serves as a platform for actors from various disciplines in the cultural and artistic fields to share their knowledge and expertise. Motivated by the desire to connect and co-create, Hayy Open Space is open to all disciplines, as long as they touch upon art and sharing.

The Sovereign Isles

The Sovereign Isles artist residency program promises encounters that bring together artists from different disciplines. The program takes its name from economically liberated, imaginary “sovereign isles” in the midst of the ocean of global economy. The Fisherman of Halicarnassus addressed to the region encompassing the Aegean Islands and its surrounding mainlands, which represented the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean civilization for him, as “Hür Adalar” (free/liberated/sovereign islands) in a letter he wrote to Azra Erhat. Situated on the east of this region, in Alanya, the program supports trials that had not yet happen due to lack of space, sharing things that have yet to transform into a work and in need of critique, instead of conception of a finished work.

Karantina Collective

Founded in 2019, KARANTINA collective has been producing contemporary art projects focusing on urban memory. Since 2022, KARANTINA has been producing interdisciplinary programs focusing on urban / rural water memory on the basis of intangible cultural heritage and ecology. Each program in the series culminates in an exhibition and leaves behind a publication.

KIRIK

KIRIK is a research-based, participatory, and critical initiative for people and topics in the cracks. By choosing KIRIK as its name, the initiative embraces and reclaims multiple meanings of this versatile word in Turkish such as crack, broken, hue, hybrid, fault, strange, queer, and bent. In its first year, KIRIK hosted a number of discussions on the radical meaning of solidarity. In 2022, they programmed films and talks on the ecological crisis, colonialism, extractivism, capitalism, crime, genocide, and accountability. In the 2023-2024 season, in addition to a screening program featuring works by LGBTQ+ artists and queer productions, a series of meetings/talks on cultural polarization and culture wars was organized with the support of various advisors.

Loading

Loading Independent Art Space, which set out with the desire to initiate a formation that would exist the in contemporary art field by its own attitude, is an independent structure that is nurtured by the existing art scene while developing its own discourse and offering a new field of vision to this environment. Operating since 2017, Loading is an open space for artists who want to produce, experience, exhibit, discuss and shape their own processes collectively. In this context, Loading supports dialogue and interaction in creative fields through workshops, artist and curator conversations, video and film screenings, exhibitions and spatial experiments, without commercial concerns and restrictions. Loading lays emphasis on an art policy that is open to collaboration with international art institutions around participatory and process-oriented work.

Montag Residency

Montag Residency is a community-building initiative in the field of culture and arts, run by independent artists and cultural workers in Balıkesir, Gönen. As a project-based and collaborative platform that brings together contemporary art and local culture, it provides production, accommodation and exhibition space for artists, curators, art writers and art initiatives. Participants are selected through invitations or thematic open calls and are given the time and facilities to focus on their projects. Montag develops projects that aim to learn and implement social participatory art practices by utilizing Gönen-Istanbul and international networks. Montag is interested in the cultural heritage, local artisans, ecology and culture of the region and wants to develop projects on these issues.

Poşe Art Space

Poşe is an independent and non-profit space that was conceived in the spring of 2018, with two artists’ initiative. In its emergence lies the desire to act and come together. It is a physical and mental space where different disciplines and forms of experiences, production, and thinking speaks to each other. Poşe doesn’t hesitate to try and fail, to learn from each other and argues that production processes are as important as the final production. Along with short-term exhibitions and public programming, it also conducts long-term research.

Selector Collective

Selector is an initiative formed by a group of artists in Ankara on November 23, 2022. Its formation is related to the notion of placement where its fellow artists position themselves in the field of art and the placement of those who are positioned across from them. It includes artists who act at a common point of resistance with their differences in form language and art practice. The point of resistance is defined as the intersection of the two bonds it has established as an artist, with life and art, and the common existence created by the coincidences at the intersections. By circling around these existences, it has built and continues to build collective consciousness with different ways of seeing. This continuity offers the unity of the artists it contains, who have built and managed its formation and self.

TOHUM

Founded in 2019 by a group of artists, curators, designers and researchers coming from different backgrounds living in the peninsula in the westernmost part of Izmir, which includes Urla, Güzelbahçe, Seferihisar, Çeşme and Karaburun, Tohum Art Initiative is the first independent art initiative started in Urla, and it focuses on the natural and cultural heritage, urban memory, history and sociology of its geography. TOHUM Art Space was initiated with the motto of "to combine art with life" by TOHUM Art Initiative in 2024 as a physical space and platform to develop and exhibit cultural and contemporary art projects, performances, meetings and workshops with a collective and participatory approach. Being collaborative, participatory, research and documentation based; it continues its work in the field of culture and contemporary art by adopting methods nourished by the combination of different disciplines.

Yıkıntılar Arasında Research and Art Initiative

Yıkıntılar Arasında Research and Art Initiative is a community of artists, academics and researchers from various fields. It treats the ruin not as a pile of debris and rubble where everything has been destroyed, but as a trace, a remnant of history that still clings to the space and continues to exist despite the erasure of the trace. While opening the demolition to rethinking with its social, political and environmental dimensions, it questions the effects of these processes on social memory, identity and spatial relations. In this context, the program offers the opportunity to examine the temporal, spatial and environmental effects of demolition in a multidimensional way through participatory art workshops and lecture series, while creating a network among artists, academics and researchers.