Ahmet Furkan İnan

Department: Ruskin School of Art

College: St John’s Colege

Thesis Title: “A Paradoxical Becoming: Abstraction and Historicity in Contemporary Art from Istanbul”

Supervisors: Professor Anthony Gardner & Professor Brandon Taylor

I’m an art historian, writer and editor working across the intersections of contemporary art and the politics of time, currently reading for a DPhil in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

I previously studied Archaeology and History of Art at Koç University in Istanbul between 2015-2020, and received my MA in History of Art from University College London in 2021. In my MA thesis, I focused on the work of Sarkis Zabunyan, a Turkish-Armenian artist living in Paris. Examining the ways in which Sarkis’ installation titled Çaylak Sokak (1986) complicates conventional assumptions about the historicity of a work of art, I analysed how the work’s hauntological qualities render the limits of art history visible. 

Before coming to Oxford, I was the managing editor of Istanbul Museum of Modern Art between 2021 and 2023. I occasionally write for art and culture publications based in Istanbul, such as Argonotlar, Varlık, Istanbul Art News and Art Unlimited.

My research at the Ruskin, supported by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP, St John’s College and the Clarendon Fund, concerns the emergence and development of contemporary artistic practices in Istanbul during the 1990s. Through a series of exhibitions, I explore how a new generation of artists configured a paradigm of art making that challenged Turkish modernism’s hegemony by asserting an autonomous sphere of production. I investigate the processes through which this autonomous sphere has gradually lent itself to the demands of a globalising art establishment over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, while claiming that a nuanced analysis of its moment of birth reveals what contemporary art has actually been and what it could have become.