ISCP Talk
May 26, 2026, 6:30–7:30pm

Artists at Work: Merve Tuna in Conversation with Avgi Saketopoulou

For this Artists at Work, ISCP artist-in-residence Merve Tuna will be joined by psychoanalyst Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou. Focusing on sculpture and materiality, they will discuss themes of play and control, regressive states during the creative process, and how experiences of desire, loss, trauma and embodied encounters take form through objects. A Q&A with the audience will follow.

Merve Tuna works at the intersection of craft, psychoanalysis, and narrative. Her object-oriented practice centers on the body and its psychosexual registers, exploring how personal and collective traumas are communicated through objects. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, film, and mathematical models, Tuna uses material experimentation and humor to give form to what exceeds language. Her work has been presented at the LOKART 3.0 – Biennale of Fine Arts in Hungary, the Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hammam in Turkey, and the Istanbul Design Biennial, among others.

Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a New York-based psychoanalyst originally from Cyprus and Greece. Her clinical work encompasses a wide array of issues, such as trauma, anxiety, and depression, working with people across a wide range of genders, sexualities, and ethnicities. She is on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and is the 2025-2026 Avenali Chair in the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. Avgi is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (2023) and is currently completing her new book manuscript, provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism: Enigma and Confusional Aesthetics in the Anti-Reparative Turn.

This program is supported by SAHA Association; Bloomberg Philanthropies; Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso; Hartfield Foundation; James Rosenquist Foundation; Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; New York City Council District 34; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; van Beuren Charitable Foundation; and William Talbott Hillman Foundation.

6:30–7:30pm

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Participating Residents

Merve Tuna

Merve Tuna, A Simpler Chess, 2025, steel, glass, and latex found objects, linen and linseed oil, on painted walnut.

Current and Upcoming Events & Exhibitions

Hans Rosenström: Conspirare

Opening Reception: Jun 30, 2026

June 30–October 9, 2026

Exhibition

Bryan Fernandez: En tránsito

Through August 7

Exhibition

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Event
May 19, 2026, 6:30–7:30pm

Book Launch of Windstorm on Saturn, Basalt Columns, MDMA, Serotonin, with Alice Wang, Bettina Funcke and Melinda Lang

In conjunction with the exhibition Alice Wang: Windstorm on Saturn, Basalt Columns, MDMA, Serotonin, artist Alice Wang will be joined by writer Bettina Funcke and Melinda Lang, ISCP’s Director of Programs and Exhibitions, for a conversation celebrating the release of her exhibition catalogue. Published by ISCP and designed by Masato Nakada, the book features an introduction by Lang and an essay by Funcke that consider Wang’s practice through questions of perception, geometry, and our relationship to planetary and cosmic systems. A Q&A with the audience will follow.

Publications will be available for purchase at the event.

Alice Wang is a Chinese-born American artist based in New York. She was a resident at ISCP from December 2024 to May 2025, supported by Canada Council for the Arts. Wang received a B.Sc. in Computer Science and International Relations from the University of Toronto, a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and an MFA from New York University. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the UCCA Dune Art Museum, China; Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles; Capsule Shanghai; Human Resources, Los Angeles; and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, among others. Group presentations include The Renaissance Society, Chicago; New Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Para Site, Hong Kong; Fotografiska, Shanghai; and the 14th Shanghai Biennale.

Bettina Funcke is a New York-based writer, critic, and editor who has published widely on contemporary art and philosophy, with recent texts on Jana Euler, Kerstin Braetsch, and Jeannette Mundt. Her book Interrupture: New York Art, 1999-2024 is forthcoming with No Place Press and her essay “Counter Cosmology or Cosmology as Counter” is forthcoming in Le Contre-Ciel (Empty Gallery, Hong Kong). She edited Documenta 13’s 100 Notes—100 Thoughts series. Her writing appears in Artforum, Bookforum, Spike, Mousse, The Brooklyn Rail, Fillip, and Texte zur Kunst, among others.

This program is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies; Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso; Hartfield Foundation; James Rosenquist Foundation; Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; New York City Council District 34; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; van Beuren Charitable Foundation; and William Talbott Hillman Foundation.

6:30–7:30pm

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Participating Residents

Alice Wang

, Cover design by Masato Nakada.

Alice Wang: Windstorm on Saturn, Basalt Columns, MDMA, Serotonin, 2025, ISCP's Second Floor Gallery. Photo by Martin Parsekian.

Current and Upcoming Events & Exhibitions

Hans Rosenström: Conspirare

Opening Reception: Jun 30, 2026

June 30–October 9, 2026

Exhibition

Bryan Fernandez: En tránsito

Through August 7

Exhibition

Donate

ISCP Talk
May 12, 2026, 6:30–7:30pm

Artists at Work: Tore Hallas in Conversation with Evan Garza

For this Artists at Work, ISCP artist-in-residence Tore Hallas will be joined by curator Evan Garza. Hallas will speak with Garza about his exploration of fatness and queerness as intertwined identities shaped by religion, class and mental health, as well as by broader social and systemic forms of oppression. They will discuss how Hallas’s work reflects on the ways bodies and minds marked as ‘other’ encounter and navigate the world. A Q&A with the audience will follow.

Tore Hallas works across video, photography, and text to examine embodiment, intimacy and belonging. Themes of movement and displacement, both physical and symbolic, recur throughout his work. He has exhibited at KINDL–Centre for Contemporary Art, Germany; Fuglsang Kunstmuseum; ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen,all in Denmark, among others. His work is in the collections of ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art; Sorø Art Museum; Vejle Museum of Art, all in Denmark, and Malmö Museum of Art, Sweden.

Evan Garza is a contemporary art scholar, queer art historian, and curator at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. They recently edited Steve Locke: I Said What I Said, the artist’s first career monograph. Honors include a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives Research Residency, a Fulbright Scholarship at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), and curatorial grants from Teiger Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation. Garza has held curatorial and institutional leadership roles at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Texas, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, and School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (now SMFA at Tufts). Garza was cofounder of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), a New York nonprofit and the first residency program in the world exclusively for LGBTQIA2S+ artists. They earned their M.A. from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute.

This program is supported by Danish Arts Foundation; Bloomberg Philanthropies; Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso; Hartfield Foundation; James Rosenquist Foundation; Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; New York City Council District 34; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; van Beuren Charitable Foundation; and William Talbott Hillman Foundation.

6:30–7:30pm

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