Bahar Avanoğlu: juice of drawing

“Bodies might resist the very reading of bodies as transformable; they may return, in this way, like the repressed, with symptoms that confound our reading” (Ahmed and Stacey, Thinking through the Skin, 2001, p.8)

Juice of Drawing is an experimental investigation in the embodiment of architectural drawing and its ways to be a site of co-resonation of secondary wit(h)nesses through a series of performative engagements. Evading representational configurations, the project unfolds this act of wit[h]nessing through the embodied transfigurative potentials of drawing, by inventing recitational methods explored through the entangling fluid materialities that allow encounters with the other. It problematizes the disembodied projection of an architectural drawing into other formations and questions and plays with projection as “the language translator’s dream” (Evans, 1997, p.181), through the resistance of the bodies that are involved: the oozing bodies of drawing, of the drawers, of the textual subjects, of the viewers, of tales and sited conditions. 

The exhibition consists of a series of recitational drawing acts engaging with a digitally archived old miniature drawing that depicts an old tale of a scene with no witnesses, transfigured into a set of points for projective purposes. These recitational methods unfolding fiction intend to unfix the singular ‘I’ of drawing into a coexistence of polyphonic voices and trigger a material imagination that is not based on referential archival documentation, and set mythical temporal states emerging from the co-existence of the past and the present.

Within these recitational encounters and exchanges (trying to pronounce the other’s letters, now exposed to the fluid scape of the sound, hearing the text in my mouth, re – ref – … flowess – … owest – … eikow – aikow - …), the points (extracted from the momentarily invented choreography of another tale inscribed on the juicy belly of the membranaceous print of the miniature) are burdened with the anticipation to move by the axioms of architectural projection. The drawing commences to ooze, the points break their projective seal, betraying their designated trajectories.

Bahar Avanoğlu is an architect-researcher based in Istanbul with an interest in embodied drawing practices in architecture, investigating critical performative field of architectural drawing, in a way that this field unsettles the conventional separation between drawing and building. Both her own artistic research works and collective drawing projects have been exhibited internationally, including WAAC (Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, 2023), Centre de Design de l’UQAM (2021). Her articles and works on drawing research have been published internationally including Drawing Matter, Daidalos, e-skop. She is the editor of the book Şiir/Mimarlık: Binanın İhlali (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2021) and co-organizer of the exhibition Unbuildings (Versus Art Project, 2024). She initiated DrawingConstructions as a polyphonic drawing project in 2017. She currently teaches design and drawing studios at MEF University and Istanbul Bilgi University.

She received her PhD degree from ITU (2024), MArchII degree from The Cooper Union (2014), MSci (2013) and BArch. (2011) degrees from ITU.

Credits for the Polyphonic Recitation:
Ali Haydar Ararut, Azra Liva Aktaş, Batuhan Avcı, Beyza Nur Özhazar, Ceyda Ece Yalçın, Duygu Gölcük, Ece Nur, İbrahim Erdoğan, Melisa Ortatuna, Merve Koyuncu, Nazlı Kaya, Ronahi Kul, Şükran Irmak Güdücüler, Yaren Şentuna + Bedirhan Ünlüer, Emre Koçar, Zeynep Akman. Participants of ‘Art and Space: Fragments’ elective course at MEF University (Fall 2025).

MAGAZIN is an exhibition space for contemporary architecture in Vienna run by Jerome Becker and Matthias Moroder. MAGAZIN presents the work of local and international architects in solo exhibitions that are especially conceived for the spaces in the Rembrandtstrasse location—framed by corresponding lectures, panel discussions and publications.