Join us virtually on Thursday, February 15 from 6 to 7 p.m. for our first Bletcher Hour of 2024, featuring guest Erdem Taşdelen.
Erdem Taşdelen’s art is featured in the Lower Gallery exhibition Structural Integrity, on at the Gallery until April 20. He has selected excerpts from Kate Brigg’s This Little Life for this month’s reading and will co-lead this month’s discussion.
Kate Briggs is a translator and professor at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. In This Little Life, Briggs presents a genre-bending exploration of the practice of literary translation. Recounting personal experience and historical practice, she presents translation as a complex and intensely relational activity. Accompanying this reading is an excerpt of Taşdelen’s exhibition booklet for A Minaret for the General's Wife, bridging between the themes of Brigg’s studies and his artistic practice.
Our discussion will take place online via Zoom. This program is free to attend. Please contact Heather Kehoe, Program & Event Coordinator, to register. Readings are sent as PDFs in advance of the event.
Erdem Taşdelen is a Turkish-Canadian artist who currently lives and works in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. Through the use of diverse materials and media, he constructs semi-fictional narratives that incorporate unique historical figures, events and texts to implicate contemporary sociopolitical realities. Selected exhibitions include The Power Plant (Toronto); Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2023); BüroSarıgedik, Istanbul; The Plumb, Toronto; Richmond Art Gallery; Art Gallery of Burlington (2022); Mercer Union, Toronto; Oakville Galleries (2021); Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga; AKA artist-run, Saskatoon (2020); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Bows, Calgary; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2019); VOX, Montréal; Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (2018); Pera Museum, Istanbul; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; Or Gallery, Vancouver (2017); Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2016); Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (2015). Taşdelen’s work has been reviewed in publications including Artforum, Flash Art, ArtAsiaPacific, Canadian Art and C Magazine. He has been an artist-in- residence at the Delfina Foundation, London; Rupert, Vilnius; and KulturKontakt Austria, Vienna. In 2019, he was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award.