BAS, which has been working on the collection, exhibition, production and distribution of artists’ publications since 2006, has launched its inventory of more than 1,000 artists’ books, magazines and other printed materials! You can visit our inventory page, developed by Emre Akyüz, to browse the BAS Artists’ Book Collection online.
The BAS inventory gets updated every few months. If you cannot find your publication on the list, this probably means that it has not been catalogued yet. For information that is missing or incorrect, you can contact us at [email protected].
Thanks to: Nihan Somay, Görkem İmrek, Corinne Butta, Berra Güvenç
BAS presents Unveil, an exhibition and performance series by Mk Yurttaş based on their research on artists’ books.
Organized in collaboration with Performistanbul, Unveilfocuses on interspecies and posthuman bodies and spaces. The artist invites the audience to engage in a performative reading of the archive by activating their works in various media spread throughout the BAS space with a series of performances.
The exhibition will be on view on Fridays and Saturdays between 3 pm – 6 pm. Performances are limited to 8 people and a reservation is required to participate.
Performance calendar April 27, 6 pm May 3, 6 pm May 4, 6 pm May 10, 6 pm May 11, 6 pm
Mk Yurttaş lives in Istanbul and continues their artistic and academic research in collaboration with Performistanbul and at Haliç University. They hold a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree from ITU Architecture, where they focused on the hybridization of body and space. They received their PhD from YTU with a thesis titled The Posthuman Body as an Interdisciplinary Concept in Contemporary Art. Their works consist of performance, installation, sound, video, photography, drawing, text and spatial interventions, as part of an ongoing artistic research project titled mikaye.
Reading between Bromley’s Speak to Me, a book on radio in the German Democratic Republic, and Di Bianco’s ongoing catalog of apologies and re-statements, Corrections and Clarifications – also revisiting Düzeltmeler ve Açıklamalar, the 2014 edition of Correctionsand Clarificationspublished in conjunction with BAS and collectorspace.
The event will be held in English and registration is not required to participate.
Speak to Me, Anna Bromley An artist’s compilation of semi-fictional essays, conversations with and illustrations by Michael Fesca and photographs by Sandy Volz Published by: Edition Error (Berlin, 2022)
In the mid-1970s a radio amplifier from Italy made its way into the region of France, southern Germany and Switzerland. Its electronic pulse gave voice to opponents of nuclear power, protesting farmers and striking workers. In 1980, it moved north to the Free Republic of Wendland. After the security forces cleared the occupied anti-nuclear camp, a photographer took in this wounded “radio thing”. Decades later, the activist amplifier lies on display in a cabinet at Berlin’s Technikmuseum, silently and stoically enduring the injuries of the past. Speak to me explores its history and dreams, occasionally rescuing other marginalized radio stories from obscurity.
Anna Bromley is an artist and writer living in Berlin. Her furtive radio listening in the disintegrating GDR forms the starting point of her artistic research on clandestine radiophonic protest groups. Following an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, she dispatches her own radio voice in search of improvised radio speech beyond state-supported broadcasters, hand-soldered amplifiers, police surveillance protocols, and polyphonic memories.
Corrections and Clarifications, Anita Di Bianco An ongoing newsprint project (2001- )
Corrections and Clarifications is an intermittent newspaper without headlines, an edited compilation of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print and online news from September 2001 to the present. A catalog of lapses in naming and classification, of tangled catchphrases, patterns of mis-speech and inflection, connotation and enumeration. The Error is Regretted / Wir entschuldigen uns für diesen Fehler, the 20th anniversary edition of the project, was published in 2021 by The Green Box in Berlin, with essays by Anna Bromley, Francesco Gagliardi, and Florian Wüst.
Anita Di Bianco’s works in film, video, and print take up, modify and re-work existing and re-imagined patterns and characterization. Her work involves the imitative act, the repossession and expulsion of narratives, the appropriation and accumulation of familiar texts and writing styles, using widely varying sources – from theatrical and historical texts to oft-quoted cinematic clips and thematic references. She lives in Frankfurt am Main.
Speak to Me, Anna Bromley (Edition Error, Berlin, 2022)
This book, compiled for the 90th birthday of pioneer poet Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, is a collection of 30 variations on her poems, mostly written between 1998 and 1999 using a Remington Rand typewriter.
Deme is an archaic word that was once introduced as a substitute for the word poetry, but it did not catch on, according to word-collection (derleme) dictionaries. It stands for one of the verse types of folk poetry and Sufi poetry, poems sung with the bağlama during cem. Additionally, word-collection dictionaries include other meanings such as word, phrase, subject, ballad, elegy, lament, stuttering (in the Bolvadin dialect), mute and pulse (in the Ermenek dialect). An interjection denoting incredulity or surprise… It also takes such forms as demece and dimece. Philosophers once used the word “deme” for the word “concept” to promote the purification of Turkish language during the Reform period.
Translation: Başak Altın Graphic Design: Sinan Kılıç, ALEF Editorial Design Publisher: BAS-İstanbul Sanat Araştırmaları Derneği Printed with the support of Ayşe Umur. Printing & Binding: Ofset Filmcilik ve Matbaacılık Sanayi ve Ticaret AŞ
Book Launch: Mochu, “Nervous Fossils: Syndromes of the Synthetic Nether”
Reading & conversation: Mochu & Emre Hüner Thursday, December 22, 6pm BAS
BAS will host the Istanbul launch of “Nervous Fossils: Syndromes of the Synthetic Nether,” written by Mochu and co-published by Reliable Copy and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in 2022. The event will start with Mochu reading a section from the book, and continue with a conversation with Emre Hüner.
The event will be held in English and registration is not required to participate. The talk will be recorded in audio.
60 process poems, written in the period from 1990 to 2000, all but a few of which were typed on Oliver Courier and Remington Rand typewriters, which constantly reference the tradition of concrete poetry and are made up of variations of processed poems by pioneering poets like Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Claus Bremer, Yüksel Pazarkaya and Ernst Jandl.
Ha… In Turkish, this word is an interjection that has multiple meanings and may express astonishment, warning, endeavour, affirmation or inquiry… Then, there is also the ‘ha’ in the word ‘hayır’… Hayır, in fact, stems from the Arabic word xayr (hay’r), meaning goodness, or better, hayır was used in 17th century Ottoman along with the negatory word yok [absent] as a euphemism, a rhetorical device, in the form, ‘yok hayır‘ or ‘yo hayır‘… to mean, ‘my answer is negative, may the best come of this’… In time, ‘yo‘, or ‘yok‘ were dropped and ‘hayır‘ remained… ha’yır also means ‘ha poetry’… ‘yır‘ meaning poetry or eloquent expression in old Turkish… Besides, there is Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca’s book of poems ‘Hoo’lar’ -the plural of Hoo-, reminiscent of ha’lar, the plural of ha… Ha is ah written backwards, too…
Summer 2021 Graphic design: Amir Jamshidi Studio Pul Publisher: BAS – İstanbul Sanat Araştırmaları Derneği Printing: Ofset Filmcilik ve Matbaacılık Sanayi ve Ticaret AŞ Pages: 232 Size: 16×23 cm Edition: 500 ISBN: 978-9944-5030-8-2
