"I'm not a studio artist, either," spray paint on a LightBox, 2023, İMÇ, Istanbul.
I’m Not a Studio Artist Either
This work originated as a response to Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin’s exhibition “I Am Not a Studio Artist” held at SALT in 2011. I spray-painted the phrase “Ben de bir stüdyo sanatçısı değilim” (“I’m not a studio artist either”) over one of my earlier lightbox pieces. What began as a gesture of alignment became something else, something porous, echoed, and inhabited by others.
The term “studio” carries both prestige and presumption. In the art world, the studio is not just a place of work, it is a site of legitimacy, authorship, and autonomy. It produces not only artworks but also the image of the artist at work. But what of those who do not or cannot occupy such a space? What of the artists whose practices spill into homes, streets, shops, or recording booths? The studio, then, becomes a kind of ergon, a center, and the absence of it, a parergon: peripheral, supplemental, sometimes discarded, yet always in relation.
The Istanbul Manifaturacılar Çarşısı (İMÇ), where this piece was later shown, complicates this reading. Originally conceived in the 1960s as a modernist commercial complex, İMÇ evolved into the heartbeat of Turkey’s music industry. Particularly in the Unkapanı blocks, it became a pilgrimage site for those from the provinces, individuals who came not to enter the art world but to become stars. For them, the “studio” meant a recording booth, a cassette factory, a place where fame was pressed onto tape. Within this layered architecture, the phrase “I’m not a studio artist either” took on new meaning. Dadaş Abdullah, a politically outspoken singer whose performances have been restricted by the state, stood before the lightbox and sang his own songs. He did not come from the academy. He does not operate within art institutions. And yet he recognized himself in that sentence. In that moment, the phrase ceased to be mine; it was redistributed, reframed.
If the studio is the assumed center of artistic production, then this work concerns itself with the edges of those who work elsewhere, otherwise. The parergonal artist is not simply outside the frame; they are what gives the frame its shape, its urgency. Like the tailors, technicians, and tape duplicators of İMÇ, their labor is often unseen, unarchived, or misrecognized. But it is no less formative.
“I’m not a studio artist either” is not a denial; it is a reframing. It proposes another kind of studio, another kind of artist, and another kind of authorship: one that acknowledges the infrastructural, the borrowed, the shared, and the uncredited.
İrem Günaydın
August 2023, Stuttgart
August 2023, Stuttgart
