Çoban Irem

Women in Digital Art: Irem Coban Turkish artist for Agora Digital Art

Irem Çoban (b. 1986) opted to take her Bachelor’s Degree at 1st rank and completed a Master’s Degree in Cinema at Galatasaray University at İstanbul, Turkey. She worked as a designer at Galatasaray University Design Workshop Unit and designed a lot of posters, magazines, and books. She has participated in group exhibitions, festivals, and workshops in various countries such as the USA, Japan, UK, Canada, Italy, South Korea, Bulgaria, Germany, and Turkey. In the Art Woman 2020 Geo-Graphies exhibition organized by Primo Piano LivingGallery in Lecce, Italy, she was awarded the best technical practice award and the Silver Certificate for her video “Tell me my future”. Her short film “Hear”, which experimentally handles the story of a child bride, has been selected for the official screening selections of various international film and art festivals. She completed her doctoral thesis at Maltepe University Fine Arts Department, Proficiency in Art. Her thesis was awarded the Doctorate Thesis Research About Gender Scholarship Award in March 2020 at the festival organized by Festiva Istanbul Culture and Art Association. She lives in Istanbul where she works as Assistant Professor in Digital Game Design Department at Doğuş University.

Artist’s statement

The artist has always found the clamped lives and crises that individuals go through in today’s ready lives interesting. In a society ruled by the patriarchal social order, social screams of the suppressed, namely women and different gender identities, are fought to be brought out the bad as it is a means of purification as well as an expression of their inner world. As long as the reality is concerned, it is always important to make the known but ignored visible to everyone. In this axis, she tries to embody the feelings that are internalized in the daily life practices, which also reflects the general views about life. Having used an interdisciplinary approach by using a combination of digital drawing, video, photography and motion graphics and generative art, she aims to convey the multidimensional character of the human that is inherent and to mirror all the dirty clothes stored in the most hidden attics of mind. She thinks that it is important to visualize and materialize internal energies with abstract forms. In her works focusing on gender and identity issues, she explores the representation phenomenon of feminist art. In this context, the problems developing in the axis of the climate crisis, on the other hand, the fact that violence against women has increased significantly in our social lives that are in quarantine due to the pandemic affect her works. As David Lynch has stated, there is a wonderful ocean of happiness and consciousness that the individual can reach by diving into himself. This ocean is the most important element to purify us.