Batu Bozoğlu
Performance Artist
Participatory Art
Bozoglu (b.1983) is a performance artist, focusing on creating interactive performance platforms which explore the relationship between the audience and the artist, and the politics of participation in art. These platforms invite the audience to partake on the production of the artwork, where the influence of these interactions has a definite and fundamental effect on the work itself. The works try to generate issues of authorship, a conflict of interest and initiate acts of empowerment and/or exploitation between the artist and the participants. These performances aim to broaden and/or challenge the medium by questioning the roles of all parties involved. By situating themselves in the praxis of everyday life and the private sphere, they try to blur the boundaries between the artistic and mundane.
Bozoglu’s recent work draws heavily from the experience of the Great War with the mechanized, random nature of its carnage and the helplessness and disillusionment it brought upon its subjects. Reflecting these issues, themes pertaining to random chance, vulnerability, submission, trauma and human-vs-machine play a great role in these artworks.
Bozoglu received his BA in Painting from Marmara FFA and his MA in VAVCD from Sabanci FASS. His MA thesis titled “Practice of Life as a Work of Art” argues that the praxis of everyday life can be transformed into an artistic medium if and when the artist opens its life and persona to concrete and intrusive manipulations from the audience and provides aesthetic documentation for these manipulations. He was granted his PhD from Marmara IFA, Dept. of Painting with his thesis titled “Dada and the Rise of the New Modernity: Aesthetics of Destruction” focusing on the influence of the psychological and material violence of the Great War on the art and artists of Dada. His thesis frames the Dadaist attitude and the artworks as a conduit for the random violence and extensive destruction brought by the war, which aesthetically express and systematically implement the same destruction to the arts, the artist and society as a whole.
Bozoglu lives and works in Istanbul and is a member of Performistanbul.