Bio 2026
Mustafa Boğa is a multidisciplinary artist working between Adana and London, across embroidery, video, photography, and installation. With a background in journalism and film, his practice is shaped by a strong documentary sensibility, constructing layered narratives that explore memory, cultural identity, and collective experience.
He graduated from Harran University’s Radio-TV Broadcasting department in 2000 and later from Istanbul University’s Department of Journalism in 2009. After moving to London, he completed an MA in Cinematography and Post-Production at the University of Greenwich, followed by an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (2014–2016). After five years working in film production, he shifted his focus fully to his artistic practice.
Boğa holds an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins and an MA in Cinematography and Post-Production from the University of Greenwich. His work has been exhibited internationally, including recent solo exhibitions in Warsaw, London, Shanghai, and Turkey, as well as presentations at institutions and events such as Edirne Biennial, Coventry Biennial, Giswil Performance FestivaI, Wirksworth Art Festival and Contemporary Istanbul. His work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries such as Attenborough Art Centre, New Art Exchange, JD Malat Gallery, Gazhane Museum, Berlavag Havne Museum and Odunpazarı Modern Museum (OMM)
His practice has been recognised through awards including the Red Mansion Art Prize (2016), the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize (Highly Commended, 2018), and the Bilsart Video Art Fund (2021). He has collaborated with artists such as Otobong Nkanga and Irena Haiduk, and performed at Documenta 14 in Kassel. His work has also been supported through residencies and fellowships at organisations including RAW Material Company in Dakar, ThirdBase in Lisbon, and the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai.
Working at the intersection of craft and contemporary art, Boğa reinterprets personal and archival material through techniques such as freehand machine embroidery and moving image. His works are held in collections including the Odunpazarı Modern Museum (OMM), Arter and Berlavag Havne Museum and invite reflection on belonging, displacement, and the construction of memory.
Artist Statement
My work explores memory, family histories, and the rituals and landscapes of my upbringing in southern Turkey. I work with family photographs, archival images, manipulated videos, and domestic textiles, including quilts and freehand machine embroidery. These materials often come from weddings, funerals, and everyday family life. By returning to and reworking these personal archives, I consider how images and memories can shift over time, revealing stories and meanings that may not have been visible when they were first created.
Through these personal archives, I explore how family histories are shaped by cultural and social expectations, and how memories are constructed, preserved, and transformed. My work often moves between personal experience and broader histories of migration, belonging, masculinity, and identity. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed record of the past, I see it as an unstable space that can be revisited, interrupted, and reimagined. Through my compositions, I create new relationships between images and materials, allowing fragments of personal history to encounter the present and suggesting connections between seemingly distant times, places, and experiences.
My background in journalism and film has shaped the way I approach my art practice. Studying journalism taught me to question before taking an initial step, while working with real-life stories, mainly as a filmmaker, made me attentive to the relationship between observation, documentation, and interpretation. This has led me to explore the boundaries between art and documentary, and between personal experience and contemporary social and political narratives. Composition has become an important part of this process. I often combine images from family archives, found photographs, and material relating to the current political climate to construct new narratives. By bringing seemingly unrelated images and subjects together, I look for unexpected connections and alternative ways of reading the past and present.