He is an artist that makes films, photographs and performances based on open investigations into cultural and ethnic belonging, forging relationships between geographies, linguistic universes and different time frames. He graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts (2010) and obtained a master’s degree from Bard College, New York (2013). He held the individual exhibition Off-White Tulips at the Ystad Art Museum, Sweden (2016) and Uqbar, Berlin (2013). He took part in the group exhibitions Blooming Signals, Kunstraum Munich (2018), and Reframing Worlds, nGbK Berlin, (2017), among others. He took part in festivals such as those of Oberhausen (2016), Dhaka (2016), Outfest – Los Angeles (2015) and Montreal (2014).
The work OFF-WHITE TULIPS (2013) is entirely composed of archive images and records of objects that are written, one by one, by the camera, creating an imaginary conversation between the artist and the American writer James Baldwin, who lived in Istanbul in the 1960s and 1970s. Safoğlu relates his personal journey to Baldwin’s, whose identity as a gay black man enables the filmmaker to investigate the political dimensions of racism and tolerance, while bringing the popular Turkish and American icons of the time into the conversation, in an unlikely autobiography narrated in third person.
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