Arzu Arda Kosar

Developed over a two year period, “Coming of Age” emerged from a dialog that Gul Cagin and Arzu Arda Kosar started with a group of youth from the “gecekondu” ghetto neighborhood of Kucuk Armutlu in Istanbul, Turkey. The project manifested itself with street installations and graffiti all over Istanbul in 2009, media and visual arts workshops, neighborhood tours with youth recording sights and memories of the place as well as examining what works, what doesn’t and how they’d change it if they could. This activity led to the interactive collage workshops entitled “Cut, Manipulate, Paste: Recreate Istanbul” in April 2010 at Kadirga Cultural Center.

The entire project culminated with the gallery installation “Youthtopia: S, M, L, XL” where the artists approached their theme with socio-spatial perspective and tried to trace and reveal narrations from different voices that otherwise wouldn’t be heard. The process of inclusion and exclusion was examined in the realms of symbolic, imaginary, real life and within which the navigation of the boundaries between the other and normal is traced by various means.

More information on the project is found at www.transistanbul.org