Gizem Üstüner is a visual artist who lives and works between Amsterdam and Istanbul. While navigating her existence in these two cities, facing bureaucratic challenges as a migrant in Northern Europe, and yearning to be closer to home, she arrived at Yellow Brick in Athens. During her residency, she engaged in conversations with Athens-based art and cultural practitioners whom she encountered in nightlife, curious about the methodologies they employ to make their work possible in this familiar yet foreign city for her.
Is This Your First Time in Batman? is a following step of her ongoing research, Low-Budget Projects in Athens, which explores how art workers develop alternative survival economies and strategies for handling their crisis on a daily basis, while examining the capital flows and private institutions that shape cultural production. The project weaves and puts into circulation vulnerable narratives shared in environments of trust, following up organic routes shaped by her lived experience here. By working with text, drawings, and printed work, Gizem adds to her long-term commitment to investigating ways to defy precarious labour and its effects in the art and cultural field. By stimulating one-to-one exchange and collaborations beyond borders, she expands a growing network nurturing solidarity and complicity among peers. Low-Budget Projects is her present approach to spreading everyday survival tactics and resistances, departing from her views and experiences with precarity, migration, and feminism.
By connecting personal and collective challenges, she illuminates the power structures shaping our daily life. In the process, she adapted to local habits, discovered bars, made new friends, and re-encountered the reasons why struggling for art can be worthwhile.
Co-curated by Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki and Eliana Otta in close dialogue with Gizem Üstüner.
Research advisor and text by Eliana Otta.
Cultural production and project assistant Daphne Koufopanou Burt.
Exhibition text by Eliana Otta
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Kindly supported by Mondriaan Fonds.
is a visual artist unfolding the everyday survival tactics and resistances with her work, particularly focusing on precarity, migration, and feminist strategies. Developing tools to confront her personal challenges, she uncovers their broader social and political meanings, exposing the hidden power structures shaping our lives.
