Aykan Safoğlu

Born 1984 in Istanbul/Turkey.

Aykan Safoğlu stages interdisciplinary narrations where his longings, dreams and contradictions challenge historical time. Appropriating technical failures, Safoğlu makes intimate memory work that defies media conventions. His hybrid artistic forms fragment, reproduce, and reorient ontological questions in film, photography, and performance.

The artist received his MFA in Photography from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2014) and holds a MA in Art in Context from UdK Berlin (2010). Recent solo exhibitions include Reckless at Kulturhaus Obere Stube (2024), Taurus at Pilot, Vienna (2023), Recess at Salt Galata, Istanbul (2022), Ebbe/Flut at Coalmine, Winterthur (2022), and I’ll Be Your Mirror at Kunstverein Göttingen (2021).

His work was also included in notable exhibition formats, such as Les Rencontres d’Arles (2021), the 39th EVA International (2021), VIDEONALE.18 (2021), and the 11th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2020). Recipient of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen at the 59thInternational Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2013) and the Birgit Jürgenssen Prize (2021), Safoğlu holds a PhD in Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2025). The artist lives and works in Vienna.