Meet Mustafa Kemal Yurttas, this year’s awardee for the SVA Artist Residency Project!

Mustafa Kemal Yurttas is an artist from Istanbul, Turkey. They work with multiple mediums including video, photography, writing, drawing, 3D modeling, installation, spatial intervention, and performance. Mustafa works through a series of fictional personas and avatars that produce art separately and together in different mediums and share their work on social media. Their latest performance was a collaboration with PerformIstanbul called “Dark organic soil formed by the decay of plants over a very long time”. During the performance, audience members wore different colored masks and explored how the COVID-19 pandemic played with our sense of smell and our bodies.