Organised as part of the public programme for Hara’s current exhibition, The Promises of Monsters, this talk invites exhibition artists Lara Ögel and Ömer Tevfik Erten to discuss their practices in conversation with Zeynep Sayın.

The event is free. To attend, please register by sending an email to [email protected]. Admission to Hara is free for visitors with a confirmed registration.

The nearest bus stop to Hara is Uskumruköy, located a one-minute walk away. Regular bus services (152 and 59HS) run from Hacıosman Metro to Uskumruköy.

Event time: 15:00

Lara Ögel

Lara Ögel (b. 1987) works with sculpture, installation, and moving image to explore how we navigate shifting and unstable worlds. Rooted in feeling, mythology, memory, and material, her practice draws on personal narratives and universal symbols. Guided by intuition and serendipity, her research unfolds through literature, archaeology, and belief systems, reflecting on how we place ourselves in the world and make meaning. Ögel’s environments open poetic, sensorial spaces where the mythic and the everyday, the personal and the collective transact in a shared visual language. Her works dwell in what resists articulation—consciousness, transformation, and the entangled conditions of being. She completed her BA in Film and Communications at Clark University and attended the Intensive Summer Foundation at London Slade School of Fine Arts.

Her most recent solo exhibitions include Echo (Bilsart, 2023), Starry Heavens Above Me and Within Me (Galerist, 2023), Verses on Water (Ariel Art, 2019), Public Confidentiality (Şekerbank Açıkekran, 2019), İmtidâd (Galata Greek School Open School Library, 2018), Go Back! All is Forgiven (Protocinema, Paris, 2016) and The Happy Average (Öktem Aykut, 2014). Recently, Ögel’s works have been included in the group exhibitions The Volcano Lover (Galerist, 2025), Distilled From Scattered Blue (Galerist, 2024), Healing Ruins (Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, 2023), Collective Healing (Metrohan, 2023), Rounded by Sleep (Arter, 2022), The Promise of Grass (5th Mardin Biennial, 2022), This Place (Yapı Kredi Culture and Art, 2021), At the End of the Day (OMM, Eskişehir, 2020), Mushrooms (Somerset House, London, 2020), I Remember (Hannah Barry Gallery, London, 2019), Great Meadow (riverrun, 2018) and Driftwood, or how we surfaced through currents (Athens, 2017). The artist took part in residency programmes at Delfina Foundation (London), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), PRAKSIS (Oslo) and Beirut Art Residency (Beirut). Lara Ögel lives and works in Istanbul.

Ömer Tevfik Erten

Ömer Tevfik Erten, also known as ÖTE (b. 1990, Mardin), is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with photography. Their practice traces boundaries and thresholds within narratives shaped by gender, the body, and the production of space.

ÖTE works with questions. Informed by inquiries like “Is there space?” (2013-2022) and the guiding question of their current practice, “What does the image invoke when a boundary is breached?”, ÖTE’s work reveals the spectral layers beneath digital surfaces, summoning an in-between elsewhere where the real and the imagined coexist simultaneously. Their images are haunted by luminous spectres that refuse sanctification, regarding even the possibility of resurrection with suspicion. These ghosts appear both radical and fragile, fragmented yet whole. For ÖTE, the boundary is a fissure in the history of photographic representation and in ways of seeing, a crack through which light leaks.

Between 2020 and 2023, the artist co-curated the queer solidarity network Through The Window Project. ÖTE’s work has been recognised with numerous awards, including the Trans X Turkey Grand Prize (2013), Prince Claus Fund Seed Awards (2022), PREE Fertile Ground Writing Competition (2024), and the 43rd Akbank Contemporary Artists Prize (2025). Based in Istanbul, the photographer continues to challenge academic modes of representation at the Photography Department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, while seeking out new playgrounds for expression.

Zeynep Sayın

Born in Istanbul in 1961, Zeynep Sayın is a scholar of literary studies, an art theorist, and an academic. Sayın studied literary studies, art history, and philosophy in Istanbul, Salzburg, and Vienna. Sayın taught at various universities in Istanbul, at the Faculty of Architecture at Mardin Artuklu University, and at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. Sayın is currently teaching in Leipzig at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (as an honorary professor) and at the University of Art and Design in Linz.

Publications by Sayın include Mithat Şen ve Bedenyazısı (Kaknüs, 1999), Noli me tangere (Kaknüs, 2000), İmgenin Pornografisi (Metis, 2003) ve Kötülük Cemaatleri (Tekhne, 2016), Ölüm Terbiyesi (Metis, 2021) and Çizginin Boşluğu (Norgunk, 2025).