Overview
Pelin Tan has been collaborating with Anton Vidokle on research, publication, film and education projects since 2004. She and Vidokle see film as a discursive platform that conveys concepts and ideas through speculative narratives of the future, present and past. Researching topics such as immortality and the end of humanity in relation to art and visual culture, genres of filmmaking and territorial contexts is vital to their understanding of filmmaking.
Tan has been an associate professor of architecture at Mardin Artuklu University, Mardin, Turkey (2013–2018), and a visiting associate professor at the University of Cyprus, Nicosia (2018); Hong Kong
Polytechnic University (2016); Hong Kong Design Trust (2016–2017); and The Japan Foundation, Tokyo (2012). She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, Boston, US (2020–2021), and a member of the curatorial board of IBA Stuttgart 2027. She also served as a guest curator for the I-DEA archival project at Matera 2019, European Capital of Culture, Matera, Italy.
She is the lead author of the chapter ‘Towards an Urban Society’ in Rethinking Society for the 21st Century: Report of the International Panel on Social Progress(Cambridge University Press, 2018). As part of the Artikisler Collective, she co-edited Autonomous Archiving (dpr-barcelona, 2016), and she has contributed articles to Swamps and the New Imagination (MIT Press & Sternberg Press, forthcoming), Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016) and 2000+: >Urgencies in Architectural Theory (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2015).
Tan was named the Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, US (2019).
She earned a BA in Sociology from Ankara University (1996) and an MA and PhD in Art History from Istanbul Technical University (2003 and 2010, respectively). She also undertook postdoctoral artistic research with Ute Meta Bauer in the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, Cambridge, US (2011).
Born in 1974 in Hilden, Germany, Tan currently lives and works in Mardin, Turkey.
SAF participation:
Sharjah Film Platform Short Film Production Grant awardee (2020)