Hakan Topal

HAKAN TOPAL is an artist based in New York. He is co-founder of xurban_collective and teaches at the School of Visual Arts’ MFA Fine Arts Program. Trained as a civil engineer, he continued his education in Gender & Women’s Studies and received his Ph.D. in Sociology of Art and Urban Sociology at the New School for Social Research, New York. Recently, he was the guest editor of ArteEast Quarterly and finished a documentary film, commissioned by the Neue Galerie (New York), on the late-eighteenth-century Austro-Bavarian sculptor Franz Xavier Messerschmidt.

As part of xurban_collective, he has been focusing on contemporary social, political and territorial issues such as military confinement and state violence, urban segregation and transformation patterns. Topal’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, PS1/MoMA (New York), Apexart (New York), Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna), Kunst-Werke (Berlin), ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), Pratt Institute Manhattan Gallery (New York), and National Contemporary Art Museum (Athens), among others. For more information, please visit www.xurban.net.