Ahmet Furkan Inan
Ahmet Furkan Inan is an art historian, writer and editor working across the intersections of contemporary art, historiography and the politics of time. He is reading for a DPhil in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.
Inan previously studied Archaeology and History of Art at Koç University in Istanbul between 2015-2020, and holds an MA in History of Art from University College London. In his MA thesis, he focused on the work of Sarkis Zabunyan, a Turkish-Armenian artist living in Paris. Examining the ways in which Sarkis’ installation Çaylak Sokak (1986) complicates conventional assumptions about the historicity of a work of art, he analysed how the installation’s hauntological qualities render the limits of art history visible.
Before coming to Oxford, Inan was the managing editor of Istanbul Museum of Modern Art between 2021 and 2023. He occasionally contributes to art and culture publications in Istanbul, such as Argonotlar, Varlık, Istanbul Art News and Art Unlimited.
His research at the Ruskin, supported by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP, St John’s College and Clarendon Fund, concerns the emergence and development of contemporary artistic practices in Istanbul during the 1990s. Through a series of exhibitions, he explores how a new generation of artists configured a paradigm of art making that challenged Turkish modernism’s hegemony by asserting an autonomous sphere of production. He investigates the processes through which this autonomous sphere has lent itself to the demands of a globalising art establishment over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, while claiming that a nuanced analysis of its moment of birth may potentially disrupt conventional assumptions about what contemporary art has been, and what it could have become.
