Çağla Althea Sokullu
Çağla Althea is an art historian, artist, curator, and poet reading for a DPhil in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the Ruskin School of Art and Christ Church, University of Oxford.
Born and raised in Istanbul, Çağla’s research explores art activism in the Mediterranean, with an emphasis on the concepts of unbelonging and borderlessness. Taking Turkey as her case study, she examines how cultural production, protest, and the ontologies of home and belonging are reimagined under authoritarian regimes. She aims to trace how marginalised communities organize and utilize artmaking and performance as a form of political agency and a means of producing sites of belonging.
The project takes the Gezi protests of 2013 as its naissance, while continually recalibrating around recent sociopolitical developments, including the systematic silencing of artists and journalists, and the raids and arrests targeting Turkish LGBTQIA+ communities. Through a postmodernist-anticolonialist lens, her project approaches activist production not as isolated aesthetic happenings but as creations whose making, movement, and interpretation are shaped by exile, precarious citizenship, and criminalised identities. Bringing theoretical inquiry into dialogue with interviews and first-hand testimony, and informed by her embodied experience within the Turkish protest scene, her work centres biennales, emerging artist collectives, and practices situated at the threshold between art and activism.
Çağla holds a BFA from Cornell University with a focus on painting and installation, and an MA in Contemporary Art History and Curatorial Studies from the University of Chicago, where she produced her thesis, Man is Not Without a Homeland: Trauma and (Un)Belonging in Contemporary Middle Eastern Installation. She is the recipient of the UChicago Dean’s Scholar Award, the Council of Arts Grant Prize, and the David R. Bean Prize for Fine Arts. Her poetry and writing have appeared in Roborant Review, Persephone: Harvard Classics Journal, Spires Magazine, and the Cornell AAP Association Journal.
Before Oxford, she worked as a curatorial assistant at the 16th Istanbul Biennale, as lead assistant curator at the Sibley and Hartell Galleries at Cornell University, and as registrar, exhibitions coordinator and writer at Dolby Chadwick Gallery. Her own work has been shown in the 2023 DeYoung Open Triennial at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and in the solo exhibition HeavyHeart at the Sibley Gallery at Cornell University.
Her DPhil research at Oxford is supervised by Professor Anthony Gardner and Associate Professor Vera May.
