A new art school and space for art production.

Nesin Art Village (NAV) is an innovative art program that was launched in 2015 by the alternative education initiative developed at Nesin Mathematics Village (NMV).
 
NMV is located at Şirince-İzmir and was established in 2007. NAV aims to maintain an approach that focuses on criticality and independent production processes. It offers a learning environment for young people from around Turkey, through workshops and seminars to be carried out by artists, academicians, writers and curators.

Contemporary art in Turkey seems to have a relatively established structure now, complete with its institutions, spaces and market. However issues of art (and) education do not seem to raise much discussion or attract alternative undertakings. On the other hand, in terms of institutional curricula – mostly skill and craft oriented, strictly compartmentalised – contemporary art practices and related discourses are kept out of the scope of educational interest. NAV can be considered as an attempt to provide a modest contribution towards an alternative platform to make up for such necessity with the help of the experience built up by NMV in years.

In 2015, as a pilot run, we limited NAV to a two-week intensive program. Since then we have been offering number of programs throughout the year. We hope to carry this initial step into a sustainable, productive and collective learning environment and possible further steps need to be imagined and designed collaboratively in terms of content, implementation and support.
 
Nesin Art Village was established in 2015  by
Işın Önol and Ali Nesin.

Isin Önol is a curator and writer based in New York. She has been working as an independent curator (predominantly in the USA, Austria and Turkey) since 2009.

Before that, she led the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art Istanbul as its director and curator for three years. 
She is a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, New York, and a visiting professor at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her research focuses on interconnecting archival information with oral histories to create platforms for collective memory through collaborative art practices.

For more about her projects, you can check :
 https://isinonol.com