egeokal [at] gmail [dot] com


Ege Okal (b. 1990) is a Turkish artist based in New York. Her work assesses, reimagines, and reconfigures the material and experiential qualities of violence, space, gender, language, diplomacy, and memory through film, animation, installation, and sculpture.

In her moving image work, she creates places in a purgatory ensconced within recognizable areas of cultural significance and spectacle. Institutional forces exist in differing degrees in these areas: banalities mix with urgency. She experiments with the ethnographic gaze of the camera; examines stratified and splintered psychological behaviors of carefully observed real scenarios and amplifies these appearances by emphasizing the emotions without a cathartic break. In her installations, she uses a diverse range of materials- from colonial trade products like coffee, corn or silk, to migrant food packaging (that are imported and mistranslated) and found objects, to more traditional sculptural materials. She is exploring potential ways of revealing and conjuring multiple meanings in a single work and investigating different degrees of precarity and the tension between fear and humor. The methodology is in the act of hand-working the artistic process. Both her artistic and curatorial practices involve collaborative thinking, participation, storytelling, and care.

She received her MFA in 2020 from Cornell University and BA from Sabanci University; has taught at Istanbul Bilgi University (TR) , Izmir University of Economics (TR), Sarah Lawrence College (USA). She is the Co-Founder and Director of Elma artist-run space in Brooklyn, NY.