Ekim Mağden

Ekim Mağden Ekim Mağden (b. 1979, Ankara) is a multidisciplinary artist who moves between painting, drawing, assemblage, upcycling, pop art portraiture, and digital manipulation. In her practice, which bridges image, object, and performance, she explores the relationships between visual memory, popular culture, the transformation of materials, and personal history. Her early relationship with visual culture was shaped during a childhood in which literature, cinema, and art were deeply intertwined. Growing up in Ankara as the child of a journalist and novelist father and an English teacher mother, Mağden was surrounded by thousands of films and images in the video rental store and film archive her family co-owned in the 1980s. While publications about world museums caught her attention in the extensive home library, painting workshops she began at an early age introduced her to the material and visual language of art. Her acting experience, which began in childhood, introduced her at an early age to the relationship between camera, performance, and public image. After receiving theater training at Pera Fine Arts High School, she enrolled in the Cinema-TV Department at Mimar Sinan University in 1997. During her university years in Istanbul, Mağden grew close to the independent art scene of the period and worked as an assistant on several projects by Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin and Ahmet Müderrisoğlu. She participated with her photo-peinture works in a group exhibition held at Bilgi University as part of the British Council-supported Outsiders Project. Due to a professional acting career that began during the same period, she turned toward professional life without completing her university education. Living in New York between 2000 and 2002, Mağden came into close contact with the city's street art, graffiti, and early upcycling practices. Witnessing the events of September 11, 2001 in New York became one of the significant experiences shaping her visual memory of the city and the era. Upon returning to Turkey, she continued her work in cinema, television, and theater while working across various fields including writing, translation, and art production. In 2024, Franz Kafka's Akad