Ahmet Öğüt

Ahmet Öğüt (born 1981 in Diyarbakır, Turkey) is a Kurdish conceptual artist living and working in Amsterdam, Netherlands and Istanbul. He works with a broad range of media including video, photography, installation, drawing, painting and printed media.

Education Ahmet Öğüt received his BA from the Fine Arts Faculty of Hacettepe University, Ankara, in 2003, and his MFA from the Art and Design Faculty of Yıldız Technical University in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2006. Öğüt has been a guest artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 2007–2008.

Career In 2009, Ahmet Öğüt represented Turkey with Banu Cennetoğlu at the 53rd Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy.

He is the founder of 'The Silent University', a programme for and with asylum seekers, refugees and migrants to give and take courses. Parts of the participative project were hosted between 2012 and 2013 at Tate Modern, Delfina Foundation, and The Showroom in London, UK.

In 2020, Öğüt had a solo exhibition at Yarat Contemporary Art Space in Baku, Azerbaijan. Due to the institution's use of the exhibition banner as a propaganda means in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, he asked for his exhibition to be taken down.

Teaching Ahmet Öğüt has been a guest professor, tutor, advisor, and research teacher at several schools. Among the schools are Institut für Kunst im Kontext at Universität der Künste Berlin; Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht; Sandberg Institute Amsterdam; Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki; TransArts - Transdisziplinäre Kunst, Institut für Bildende und Mediale Kunst Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien; and DAI (Dutch Art Institute) Arnhem.

Since 2021 Öğüt is guest professor at Universität der Künste Berlin at the Institut für Kunst im Kontext.

Solo exhibitions 'Ahmet Öğüt', Mala Galerija / The Museum of Modern Art of Ljubljana, 2005 'Ahmet Öğüt and Borga Kantürk', Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, 2006 'Softly But Firmly', Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, Zagreb, 2007 'Across the Slope', Centre d'Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, 2008 'Mutual Issues, Inventive Acts', Kunsthalle Basel, 2008 'Things we count', Künstlerhaus Bremen, 2009 'Speculative Social Fantasies', Artspace, Sydney, 2010 'Ahmet Öğüt: No Protest Lost', curated by Henriette Bretton-Meyer, at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2017-2018 'Ahmet Öğüt: No poem loves its poet', curated by Mari Spirito, at Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2020

Group exhibitions 9th Istanbul Biennial, 2005 Softly but Firmly (published by Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, Zagreb, 2007) On The Road to Other Lands (published by A Prior and 5th Berlin Biennial, 2008) Informal Incidents (published by art-ist contemporary art, Istanbul, 2008)