Refik Anadol is a media artist and director born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1985, who currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is a lecturer and visiting researcher at the University of California Los Angeles’ Department of Design Media Arts.

Anadol works primarily in the fields of site-specific public art and combines parametric data sculpture approach and live audiovisual performance with an immersive installation approach, particularly his works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts.

As a media artist, designer and spatial thinker, Anadol is intrigued by the ways in which the transformation of the subject of contemporary culture requires rethinking of the new aesthetic, technique and dynamic perception of space. Anadol builds his works on the nomadic subject’s reaction to and interactions with unconventional spatial orientations. Embedding media arts into architecture, he questions the possibility of a postdigital architectural future in which there are no more non-digital realities. He invites the viewers to visualise alternative realities by presenting them the possibility of re-defining the functionalities of both interior and exterior architectural formations. Anadol’s work suggests that all spaces and facades have potentials to be utilised as the media artists’ canvases.

Anadol has received a number of awards, prizes and residencies for his work including, the Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Award, SEGD Global Design Award and Google’s Art and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award. His site-specific audiovisual performances have been presented internationally at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, US; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles US; International Digital Arts Biennial, Montreal, CA; Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria, l’Usine, Genève, Switzerland; Arc De Triomf, Barcelona, ES; Zollverein, SANAA’s School of Design Building, Essen, DE; SantralIstanbul Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, TK; Outdoor Vision Festival, SantaFe New Mexico, US; Istanbul Design Biennial, TK; Sydney City Art, AU; Lichtrouten, Lüdenscheid, DE.

www.refikanadol.com

Exhibitions

2018 Melting Memories Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, TU