In Conversation: Teju Cole with Didem Pekün

As part of the public programme around Didem Pekün’s current exhibition Of Dice and Men at Delfina Foundation, Teju Cole and Didem will be in conversation about their works and exploring common grounds such as migration, the ephemeral and the essayistic.

Biographies

Teju Cole is a writer, art historian, and photographer. He is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and photography critic of the New York Times Magazine. He was born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, and raised in Nigeria. He currently lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of two books, a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, named a book of the year by the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, NPR, and the Telegraph, and shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award, and a novel, Open City, which also featured on numerous book of the year lists, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature.

Teju Cole has contributed to the New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta, and several other magazines. His forthcoming book is Known and Strange Things, a collection of essays. His photography has been exhibited in India, Iceland, and the US, published in a number of journals, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition in Italy in April 2016. He has lectured widely, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design to Twitter Headquarters, and gave the 2014 Kenan Distinguished Lecture in Ethics at Duke University. He was awarded the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction.

Didem Pekün’s work explores both research and practice; conceptually it deals with the production of subjectivities within violent geographies, displacement, and contemporary border politics.

Her studio practice includes documentaries and video installations, and her work have screened internationally at festivals and galleries, (Berlinale, Arnolfini, Oberhausen, Punto de Vista, WOMEX, MUSAC, SALT Istanbul) have received and been nominated to awards, (British Council, Turkish Film Critics Association (nominee)), and attended residencies (Delfina and Greenhouse).

She was born in Istanbul in 1978 and has been oscillating between London and Istanbul since 1999. Following a BA in Music at SOAS, and an MA on Documentary at Goldsmiths, she is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths (2016) and a faculty member at Media and Visual Arts Department at Koç University.