Serkan Özkaya, 1973

Serkan Özkaya holds an MFA from Bard College, New York, a PhD in German language and literature from İstanbul University, where he also earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and a master’s degree in fine art from the Nantes Fine Arts Academy in France.

Serkan Özkaya is known for his mischievous, playful, and brash style. Through his installations, performances, and sculptures, he instigates intellectual discourses with prominent art institutions across the world to satirize their corporate structure. Through his practice, Özkaya reconsiders concepts such as originality, copy, duplication and appropriation. For example, he once wrote a letter to the Louvre recommending that the Mona Lisa be hung upside-down. On another occasion, he faxed the Philadelphia Museum of Art a warning that one of his friends was planning to take a leak in Duchamp’s urinal on display there.

Özkaya’s “Confectioner’s Apprentice” is a sculpture of a youth carrying trays of eggs who has just tripped over and is about to fall, face forward. Everything about the work – including the eggs – is a life-size “copy” of their “original”. The action is caught freeze-frame a moment before the inevitable disaster, whose consequences the viewer can easily guess. Nevertheless, we are also aware that all this seeming “reality” is just a fibreglass copy of the real thing.