SERRA TANSEL

Serra Tansel (1989) was born in Istanbul and currently lives in London. She graduated from Central Saint Martins, London’s Fine Art department, in 2011. 

Tansel’s practice nourishes from everyday occasions, topics, objects, and coincidental encounters; the way she engages with them through her works reverses their statements and establishes a new perspective on their meanings. Her works answer society’s most fundamental open wounds and contemporary discussions in a manner in which playfulness and irony show with distinct criticism.

Various inspiration points surface through her works, such as when a camera lens, as well as the history itself, is framed in a way to cut the women's impact out of the literal and metaphorical picture, and Tansel had to intervene with her brush (Headed Woman, 2019) or when she focused on changing urban aesthetics through exposing the absurdity within the gentrified newly built apartment complexes’ names in her HIGHER (2019) solo exhibition hosted in Pilot Gallery.

Her solo and group exhibitions include Bag, Pedestal, Rabbit, Potato, St.Staffordshire, London (2022), What Water Knows, PILOT, Istanbul (2022); Sinopale 8, Sinop (2022); Senkron, PILOT, Istanbul 2021; A Question of Taste, Pera Museum, Istanbul (2021), SH/FT, noshowspace, London (2021), HIGHER, PILOT, Istanbul (2021); Heavens!, Battersea Arts Centre, London and Bilsart, İstanbul (2019); Sinopale 7 (2019); Billboard 8171, Annin Arts, London (2018); Hiç Birşey Görememek/ Not Seeing Anything group show curated by Mari Spirito, Alt Bomonti, İstanbul (2017); Sera Tansel Unlimited, noshowspace, London (2015); Dünya Döner, Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp (2015); Γ Λ Υ Κ Ι Α   Μ Ο Υ with Joanna Peace, Snehta, Athens; Su İkramımızdır with Duval Timothy, Polistar, İstanbul (2014). Residencies include Neapolitan Dialogues funded by T-One and Fondazione Morra, coordinated by Vittorio Urbani (2022); GROUNDED Battersea Arts Centre Agents of Creative Change programme set up by Amy Pennington , Growing Underground, London (2017-18); Air Antwerpen, Antwerp (2015-16), ParaSite School Residency set up by Felipe Castelblanco at Royal Academy, London (2015), SNEHTA Residency, Athens (2015) AIR Mini Residency, on public art, London (2012), The Drift Project, on performance art, Rio (2012)

Tansel is a member of the collectives Hayırlı Evlat which they founded with İpek Hamzaoğlu and Gizem Karakaş; a founding member of the music collective Makkam, together with Alper Oruç, Daniela Nofal and Yamen Makdad; and was part of Bonnington Café, which ran between the 1980s and 2021.