Serhat Köksal, aka Berbat Zöksal, or 2/5 BZ is a multimedia artist based in Istanbul. During the last two decades, Köksal has displayed his work in many formats : tapes, videos, collages, sounds, fanzines, CDs, texts, CD-roms, and live performances. He is also omnipresent on the internet, feeding his numerous blogs. All are easily recognizable by their punky, messy, and mashed-up styles. In his videos, old movies are mixed with news broadcasts, logos, graphics, sound samples, slogans, and pop cultural references in a way that reminisces the Situationist International films.

Far from any esthetic quest or artistic narcissism, Serhat Köksal has created an original way of to recycle Turkish cultural junk. For him, Berbat Zöksal is “a critical and humorous re-use of mass culture which investigates cultural cliches and their effects on the economic and political situation of individuals”.

Serhat Köksal took a position against projects which he sees as neoliberal artistic operations, like the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture and the contemporary art biennial. A counter-cultural artistic engineer, his targets ranger from capitalism, imperialism, exoticism, and orientalism to mass tourism, consumerism, gentrification and globalisation.





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