Atıf Akın is an artist living in New York and Associate Professor of Art & Design at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. His work is about technoscientific criticism in the context of contemporary art, science, and politics. Integrating technology as both subject and means of expression, Akın explores issues that are considered sensitive in the public discourse, unlocking them from the rigid political categories in which they reside.
In 2009, his work was listed in the Younger Than Jesus art directory of the New Museum, published by Phaidon. That same year, Akın co-curated a seminal media art exhibition, Uncharted: User Frames in Media Arts in İstanbul, and edited an accompanying book. Akın was the recipient of the 2015 apexart Franchise Program award in New York, and the organizer of the zine project and exhibition, Apricots from Damascus, on behalf of apexart, and co-produced and hosted by SALT in İstanbul. In 2016 he exhibited Mutant Space: Metsamor at the İstanbul Archaeological Museums, part of his ongoing long-term research-driven art project on nuclear mobility, in the con text of Design Biennial and the same year he took part in the public programming of Olafur Eliasson’s Greenlight Project, hosted by TBA 21 in Vienna. With the same institution, he embarked on an expedition to research nuclear test sites in French Polynesia. Between 2018 to 2020, part of his long-term research-driven art project on nuclear mobility and oceanography, Tepoto Sud morph Moruroa was on display at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Singapore, Le Fresnoy Museum in France, and The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, Sweden and SUNY Binghamton galleries in New York.
In 2022, he participated in the İstanbul Biennial curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar, and David Teh, exhibiting Mutant Time, a survey of my research over the past ten years on radiation and archaeology.
In the inaugural exhibition of the İstanbul Modern Museum, my work Teaching a GAN the Alphabet joined the art historical canon as a response to Baldessari’s 1972 piece Teaching a Plant the Alphabet. The project contemplates the possibility of inter species communication. In the same year, 2024, I installed a very large public art project titled O, which explores the vertical horizons of an industrial archaeology site in Beykoz, İstanbul. Since the beginning of his practice, he has been interested in manifestations of boundaries–physical, metaphorical, linguistic–that exist around science, nature, and politics. In an effort to create the most effective presentations, he refused to settle into an established medium of expression, and instead, move fluidly between various media, including photography, video, and visualization of quantitative information and programmable media. By looking at scientific and political phenomena, he extracts and creates meaning in a visual context, with broad political and scientific significance. His works appear as museum, gallery or public space installations, and in screen-based and printed publication formats, including online works.
Akın studied science and design at a public university in Türkiye, Middle East Technical University in Ankara, and worked in İstanbul as an artist and educator before moving to New York in 2011.