Defne Ayas, The Curator of the Bienale Pavilion for Turkey,

Mavi Boncuk | 

The curator of the Bienale pavilion for Turkey,  Defne Ayas, has been the director and curator at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, since 2012. Since 2005, she has been a curator at Performa, the biennial of performance art in New York. In September 2012, Ayas co-curated the 11th edition of the Baltic Triennial of International Art, to great acclaim. The Advisory Board consists of artist Ali Kazma, associate professor of Art History at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Art Burcu Pelvanoğlu, independent curator and art critic Cristiana Perrella, Bahçeşehir University’s Associate Professor in history and theory of art and visual culture Lewis Johnson and Yıldız Technical University art and design faculty member Zerrin İren Boynudelik.. Sarkis, is no stranger to large-scale, international art exhibitions. He took part in curator and artist Harald Szeemann’s well-known exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form,” originally staged at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 and reenacted at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. She has also participated in Documenta VI (1977) and VII (1982) and 45th Venice Biennale (1993). 

Ayas is also the founding co-curator of Blind Dates Project (with Art Historian & Curator Neery Melkonian), an artistic platform that is dedicated to tackling what remains of the peoples, places and cultures of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1923). The concept for Blind Dates was developed byAyas and Melkonian upon the invitation of Dr. Ani Kalayjian in late 2005. Under the title Blind Dates: New Encounters from the Edges of a Former Empire, thirteen new collaborative artistic projects including by Nina Katchadourian, Ahmet Ogut, Jalal Toufic, and Michael Blum-Damir Naksic were launched in 2010, together with a series of related public programs which began two years prior to the resulting exhibition, providing a rare platform, particularly in the North American context, for both artists and non-artists.