Saturday, October 3, 4:00–5:00 p.m.
1h
€60
From 16 years old
ENGLISH
Burçak Bingöl & Jessica Cerasi
Join The Heart’s Desire curator Jessica Cerasi in conversation with exhibiting artist Burçak Bingöl for an exploration of Bingöl’s artistic practice and her work created for the exhibition. Drawing on her distinctive use of ceramics, ornament, and architectural forms, Bingöl will discuss how her practice investigates memory, cultural transmission, fragility, and transformation, while reinterpreting traditional craft through the language of contemporary art.
Drawing on the themes of the exhibition, the conversation offers a unique opportunity to gain insight into Bingöl’s artistic vision while exploring the role of contemporary art in engaging with history, tradition, and the human condition. Audience questions will conclude the event.
THIS DISCUSSION IS CONDUCTED IN ENGLISH.
Burçak Bingöl, born in 1976 in Görele, lives in Istanbul
Burçak Bingöl has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Frieze Sculpture, and the Istanbul Biennial, and has developed a practice based on processes of tracing, copying, and reformulating to deconstruct familiar motifs. Following extensive research, she stages an indoor rose garden ceramic installation referencing 16th-century Ottoman Iznik plates, the MACS MTO garden, and the foundational Sufi parable of the Rose and the Nightingale, central to the Sufi narrative of longing and unattainable love.
Jessica Cerasi, guest curator
Jessica Cerasi is an independent curator, and Head of Programme at the Bagri Foundation. Most recently, she curated Shezad Dawood’s midcareer retrospective Skin of Dreams at the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation (8 April–20 September 2026). She was co-curator of the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the Venice Biennale in 2024, and a curator for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation from 2020-2024. Previously held curatorial roles include at the UK Government Art Collection, Carroll / Fletcher gallery, and the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre. She was also Assistant Curator for the Venice Biennale in 2019, and Assistant Curator for the Biennale of Sydney in 2016.
With a strong interest in fostering contemporary art appreciation among new audiences, she led a popular course on “Demystifying Contemporary Art” at Tate Modern (2017-2019), and is author of Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art? (2017, with Kyung An) and Contemporary Art Decoded (2021). She has contributed to numerous exhibition publications, including the 2026 Venice Biennale and Halil Altındere’s MOTHERLAND, and was a juror for the Artist of the Year Award (2025), and Mamüt Art Project (2024).
Burçak Bingöl. ©Mine Erkmen, 2025. Jessica Cerasi ©Tash Nellist, Courtesy of the Ministry of culture Saudi Arabia
