Ekin Onat

Ekin Onat, born 1976 in Istanbul, had her education at Conservatory Istanbul in classical ballet and started her debut in theater with Andrej Woron's Theater Kreatur in Berlin, staying there for two years. She left the theater company and set out for a 3-years journey leading from Gabon to Indonesia, finally settling in Bali, where she was working on her first video art project. After returning to Istanbul, she started her career in visual arts, focusing on conceptual art and video installations taking on the sociopolitical conditions in Turkey. The civil unrest in 2013 that erupted in Turkey during the Gezi Park uprising was followed by brutal police response, leading to a deep rift between the religious rooted political elite and the freethinking minds opposed to it. Ekin Onat processed this collective trauma of a hole generation in a live performance and large-scale video installation that was shown in 2017 during the Venice Biennale drawing critical acclaim worldwide. This last exhibition being opposed to the government forced her to leave Istanbul and resettle in Berlin, where she produced 2019 the film 'Second Skin', an acclaimed short movie depicting racism in cultural melting-pot Berlin. Back to Istanbul in 2019, as a founding member of 'Delt Productions', a film production based in Istanbul, she wrote and directed Kayip (Lost) and produced Dolma.