The Learning Commons: Self-Organised Learning

The conversation will start with Zeyno’s decades-long involvement with self-organised spaces and collectives in and beyond Turkey and continue with the contributions from the SoC community to collectively imagine the ways such communities appear and disappear globally. The conversation will end with a discussion on how knowledge is produced and circulated within self-organised spaces.

Zeyno Pekünlü is an artist whose artistic interventions mostly take the form of videos and installations. She is currently running the Istanbul Biennial’s Production and Research Program and the Istanbul Cell of Fellowship for Situated Practice organized by BAK Utrecht. Together with Köken Ergun, she is co-founder of KIRIK, an initiative for people and topics in the cracks. She is on the editorial board of Red Thread Journal and also a member of The Institute of Radical Imagination. She was part of the collective Dünyada Mekan (A Place on Earth), a self-organized solidarity space that provided freelancers with free working space. Zeyno has been involved in several initiatives for freedom of expression and art workers’ rights in Turkey, since 2011.

Betül Aksu explores the ways disciplinary, territorial and systemic boundaries manifest in everyday life through installation, performance, text and printmaking. Her work questions the notion of categorisation that is constantly redefined by the status quo. She is interested in ongoing practices and collaborative modes of working that initiate dialogues about precarious living and working conditions in the art world. In 2023 Betül Aksu founded sezon, an independent art space based in Izmir, Turkey set out to explore the politics and poetics of change. She is among the 2023/2024 Fellows within the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice post-academic program.