As for many artists, the lockdown impacted Turkish artist Bora Akinciturk’s production and studio routine. Forced to stay at home, Akinciturk experimented with making smaller paintings. Moving to this scale was somewhat convenient, as it enabled him to work at a faster pace, addressing potential concepts stored on his iPhone’s Notes app. Largely manipulating oil-on-canvas, Akinciturk often uses online software to help render his images although is tired of the prescribed binary between the handmade and the digital. On a case-by-case basis, Akinciturk uses whatever means are possible to construct his hyperrealistic paintings exploring themes of conspiracy, cultural identity, ideology, meme politics and religion. A particular work, ‘how’s your apocalypse coming along’ (2020), illustrates the artist’s complex interest in, and relationship to, the power of images and messages anonymously and regularly circulating online, forcing themselves on our devices. He quite scarily reveals that the original image was sent by a self-proclaimed prophet/cult leader artist’s Instagram feed, and that he was approached by them, as a lot of his friends on Facebook were, around mid-2020 with a copy-and-paste message that began “How’s your apocalypse coming along, Bora?”. Now having returned to his studio at SET, Dalston, he typically begins as early as he can, around noon, following breakfast and morning neck and back exercises, because of a cervical disk herniation, activities that are all currently soundtracked by nostalgic music from the ‘aughts: Gorillaz and The Prodigy. When asked for a website recommendation for our readers to while away the hours, Akinciturk quickly suggests the darkly comedic films of American musician, professor, performance and visual artist Jacob Ciocci. Online creator communities are also hugely important to Bora, who spends much of his time on the internet and likes to be available to speak with!
