Ahmet Furkan Inan (b. 1996, Istanbul) is an art historian, writer and editor working across the intersections of contemporary art, historiography and the politics of time. He previously studied Archaeology and History of Art at Koç University (BA, Istanbul, 2020) and History of Art at University College London (MA, 2021, Distinction), where he focused on the work of Sarkis Zabunyan, a Turkish-Armenian artist living in Paris. Before coming to Oxford, he was the managing editor of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art between 2021 and 2023. His occasionally contributes to art and culture publications in Istanbul, such as Argonotlar, Varlık, Istanbul Art News and Art Unlimited.
His research at Oxford, supported by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP and the Clarendon Fund, concerns the emergence and development of contemporary artistic practices in Istanbul during the 1990s. Through a series of exhibitions, he explores how a new generation of artists configured a paradigm of art making that challenged Turkish modernism’s hegemony by asserting an autonomous sphere of production. He investigates the processes through which this autonomous sphere has lent itself to the demands of a globalising art establishment over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, while claiming that a nuanced analysis of its moment of birth may potentially disrupt conventional assumptions about what contemporary art has been, and what it could have become.
