recent works/
projects/exhibitions

ankara/düsseldorf

In the year 2020, a connection was reestablished with the city where I was born, Ankara, through an art project. In addition to the work in my Düsseldorf studio, at certain intervals, sometimes alone but mostly with new young artist friends, we started producing collaborative projects in a garage I rented there as a artists studio.

As a result of this, my artistic production began to show differences and diversities both in terms of form and content. Performance, installation, acoustic art, and text works started to be added to my predominantly painting and sculpture-based works.

NUE Galeri/Ankara/Dec2023-Jan2024
"senseless/anlamsız"

This exhibition showcases works I've created using spray paint. The working conditions of my studio, "garaj," in Ankara, being intertwined with the outdoor environment, played a decisive role in my choice of this material. My goal was not so much to integrate graffiti materials into gallery art but rather to use their direct, improvisational technical and formal possibilities. These possibilities aligned with the methods and working style I employ in my artistic endeavors—focusing on capturing the moment, embracing simplicity, and reaching results directly.
...
This exhibition presents illusions to the viewer without any basis. It does so deliberately. Preferring a painting method that embraces unexpected results, randomness, or in a sense, "mistakes," is also for this reason. These formations pretend to tell something within the rules of the game of painting. In reality, they are nothing more than individual projections of the accidental traces of the perceptual and intellectual accumulations, experiences of the creator in the moment. Rather than telling the viewer something, they suggest them to derive their own share, to encounter their own realities.

remaining/kalan/Ankara/Sept 2023

(a cooperation with Fatih Karatekin)

After a death, Coşkun Demirok constructs an anti-monument to his past. He interprets his personal loss, his own position, and the sense of emptiness he faces through the concepts of temporality, randomness, and meaninglessness, which are also his areas of interest as an artist. An installation made of building materials resembles a relic with some abandoned and forgotten objects left on it. Cutouts of photographs from his family album create extensions spread on the walls that seem to be shattered at any moment. His work, created using computer programs and natural sounds, is part of the acoustic dimension of the installation.

(Fatih Karatekin transforms found footage films and photographs, as well as hospital records, into a visual experience using both digital methods and original projection and slide equipment. He re- experiences the material, which has come together by chance and has undergone natural deterioration, in order to trace the unknown. Records bearing traces of past eras now carry their own reality in new forms. Images that have partially disappeared have become documents of voids and losses, bringing their own aesthetics with them. The viewer confronts a kind of double extinction, facing the fact that recorded traces of life are being erased, and the material that constitutes its record is dissolving.)

exposure/teşhir/Ankara//July 2023(a cooperation with the musician Yaman Zencirci)

This time, "garaj" presents an audio-visual experience in the collaboration of Coşkun Demirok and Yaman Zencirci. The show aims to share the natural working states of the artists with the audience/listeners in their own workshops. Demirok's poetic text collages, created from newspaper or art writings in the booklets titled "active life" and "active art," engage in a dialogue with Zencirci's analog sounds and sound collages. The garage space is covered with paper cut-ups referencing visuals in the "active life" booklet, transforming into a visual experience.

(Yaman Zencirci Born in Ankara, he completed his double bass undergraduate studies at the Rotterdam Conservatory and his master's degree at the Utrecht Conservatory. After a long period of work in various fields such as academia, orchestral musicianship, and jazz, he is now diving into electronic sounds.)

participation on group show at METU/ Ankara//July 2023

Digitally printed on rachel fabric in 6 different colors, each 133cm/200cm

The six-part "installation" entitled "bakış/gaze" consists of differently colored flags depicting an observing eye. This type of depiction goes back to ancient times. Perhaps the best known of these is the "Eye of Horus" in Egyptian civilization and this states that the eye of conscience is always on us.

The flags will be attached to tree trunks along the way to the university campus. They are intended to draw the attention of passers-by to the fact that the feeling (not least due to today's technologies) of being constantly under observation has become a matter of course. In addition, this symbol can also be interpreted in such a way that under certain social conditions the need arises for the individual to consciously/unconsciously and voluntarily place oneself under introspection.

"aktif yaşam"

performative book launch
with the participation of
Hazel Kılınç, Ekin Kula, Zeynep Üçöz
YerMekan, Ankara

from the invitation text:

"Architect and artist Coşkun Demirok, who has been experiencing a resurgence between the city he has been living in for a long time, Düsseldorf, and the city he was born and raised in, Ankara, recently compiled text collages he created using contemporary media terminology into a booklet. These "poetic lines," entirely composed of quoted texts, are integrated with images of the artist's works using newspaper pages. Although he sets out from a search for a new aesthetic, he mentions that he is aware of the consciousness of the dadaists (Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, and others) or Kurt Schwitters' provocative "sound poems" (Lautgedichte) and content-contrary poems against academicism, bourgeois conservatism when he embarked on the work. The surprise he encountered after the end of the booklet was related to an extensive exhibition organized for William S. Burroughs in 2012 at the Vienna Art Museum. The exhibition brought together numerous artworks of this important representative of the "Beat Generation" that reveal the true nature of newspaper headlines through text, image, and film collages. It is known that Burroughs took over the method of creating new meanings by cutting these newspaper clippings from Brian Gysin. Coşkun Demirok, on the other hand, transforms the sentences he extracts from their contexts into the lines of a poetry book. He sees his work as an artistic resistance against the unbearable nature of social existence on one hand and as an attitude towards melancholy, artificiality, and thus self-deception in art, particularly in poetry. While the lines may sometimes evoke a smile, it is impossible to ignore their blatant reality. Our reading can naturally turn to experimental forms."

human nature/insan halleri/NUE Galeri/07+08 Oct2023

Throughout my journey, I've always been guided by an artistic understanding that seeks the new. What brought together theater and performance artist Miray Kotil and me was not merely a pleasant coincidence but the constructive energy that arose during the dialogue caused by that coincidence. Our mutual suggestions complemented each other and quickly found form.

I realized a method I've used in my other artistic works, namely, achieving more direct and intimate results under restricted conditions, as a choreography. While the movement area is constrained by the strings stretched between the walls on one hand, on the other hand, it leads to a desperate but creative flexibility. This performance, or rather, this work that can be characterized as contemporary dance, thus creates its own choreography.

Two realities are at play here. The first is the unforeseeable outcome of my own construction. The other is Miray Kotil's reality, which I cannot foresee. We work together and against each other at the same time. A situation that seems under control at first glance yields an uncontrolled result.