Far Afield & From Next Door

Nadas’a Bırak Spring 2021

An exhibition featuring works by our inaugural cohort of online residents

The spring of 2021 brought the pilot programme of our online artist residency. Nadas’a Birak Art Residency has from its conception focused on forging connections and providing a safe and calm space for artists to exercise their creativity, a mission which easily aligned with our transition to an online format following the complications presented by a global pandemic. Our prior programmes were open to all but encouraged local participation as we weighed the benefits of intercultural communication and global community-building against the environmental impact of long-distance and air travel. With this iteration we had the exciting opportunity to invite artists from far outside Istanbul without these complications, expanding the time frame of the programme and allowing residents to incorporate a residency experience into their daily lives. Our decisions stemmed from reflection on what an online residency could provide and how it could be enriched by re-evaluating traditional coworking structures in response to what we have learned from the pandemic about systems of physical movement and virtual interaction. With the participation and hard work of our residents we created a virtual community where they were able to build personal and creative connections in a time of unprecedented disconnect. 

For three weeks, our cohort shared ideas, resources, knowledge, music and more, working alongside one another in an area of calm we carved from the vast virtual space where we spend so much of our current lives. In this gallery you can find documentation of the work conducted during this time, work from around the world that coexisted in our small space for a short time, that grew from what we drew from each other - beyond borders and across seas.