"Sampling the Document or Documenting the Sample: An Interview with Banu Cennetoglu
March 11th, 2011
by Alex Freedman
Banu Cennetoglu’s website has read “meşgul/busy” since the summer. And even after four months of emails, having never meet in person, Banu Cennetgolu is still a source of fascinating mystery to me. Sources report that she’s shy; a mutual acquaintance leaning over a freezer stuffed with a pre-biblical stalagmite raved about how lovely she is; my best guess is that she’s damn independent. Born in 1970, Cennetoglu left Turkey in 1994 after receiving a BA in Psychology to study photography in Paris. What came next was a whirlwind of travel dates and photographic assignments, before trading in New York for the Rijksademie in 2002 to do “something more concrete.” Returning to Istanbul in 2006, she founded BAS, Turkey’s first archive dedicated to contemporary artist’s books, and Bent, the country’s first art book publishing house with Dutch artist Philip Hoegen. Her early works articulate a desire to document, chronicles which bare traces of her photo assignments for mags like Purple, while her recent works circulate documents, or witnesses, rendered fragile and whisked with an ardor for saving and making material public. But check it out for yourself at Guilty feet have got no rhythm, now on view at Kunsthalle Basel through March 31."
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