7th Mardin Biennial Children’s Workshops
The children’s workshops organized within the scope of the biennial will be conducted with artists living in Mardin. Each workshop leader will interpret the biennial theme together with children through their own artistic practice, techniques, and creative approach. The workshops aim to encourage children’s active participation in processes of thinking, producing, and interpreting.
Biennial Children’s Workshops Coordinator: Ezgi Tek
Workshop Leaders:
Ayhan Akikol | Bawer Doganay | Büsra Akgeyik | Ceren Solmaz | Ezgi Tek | Hesen Chalak | Mehmet Akan | Ridvan Asar | Sidar Alisik
Workshop Venues:
International Design Foundation Children’s Culture House – Exhibition Spaces – Museums – Schools – Public Spaces
WORKSHOPS
The Story of Art: Biennial
Artist & Workshop Leader: Ezgi Tek
Venue: International Design Foundation Children’s Culture House – Exhibition Spaces – Museums – Schools – Public Spaces
This workshop begins with a brief introduction to the historical development of biennials. Through selected artworks from different biennials, participants collectively explore contemporary art practices, conceptual approaches, and forms of artistic expression.
In the continuation of the workshop, the concept of the “biennial” is approached as a space for thinking. Participants position themselves as biennial artists, develop personal interpretations around a given concept, and create original works.
The workshop aims to support conceptual thinking, interpretation, creative production, and individual expression skills.
The Color of the Sky
Artist & Workshop Leader: Mehmet Akan
Venue: International Design Foundation Children’s Culture House
Within the workshop, the story The Color of the Sky is shared with participants. Inspired by the story, children create their own unique depictions of the sky through imagination and personal interpretation.
The workshop aims to support children’s imagination, visual storytelling, and creative expression skills.
Seven Skies Workshop
Artist & Workshop Leader: Ayhan Akikol
Venue: International Design Foundation Children’s Culture House
The Seven Skies Workshop is an experience-oriented production workshop inviting participants to reflect on the delicate line between sky and earth.
Using branches, leaves, and natural materials collected from the environment, participants observe the shadows cast by sunlight on surfaces. Gathered around a long table, children interpret these shadow traces on paper through drawing and watercolor practices.
The temporary forms created by natural materials and light are reshaped through the children’s individual interventions, transforming the relationship between sky, shadow, and earth into a creative field of production.
The workshop aims to support observation, imagination, visual perception, and original expression skills.
Trace with Dough, Surface with Print
Artist & Workshop Leader: Sidar Alisik
Venue: Production through walking among biennial exhibition spaces
“Trace with Dough, Surface with Print” invites participants to explore the relationship between surface, trace, and space through an alternative printmaking approach. The workshop begins with walks through the biennial venues, where participants collect traces from both exhibition spaces and the stone textures of Mardin.
Using modeling dough, impressions are directly taken from surfaces such as doors, walls, and floors, transforming these traces into a personal visual memory. Throughout the process, concepts such as the memory of surfaces, tactility, and carrying traces are experienced.
The collected traces are rearranged and combined, enabling participants to create their own surface compositions. While supporting individual production, the workshop also aims to establish a collective narrative through the merging of traces from different spaces.
As a result, participants develop an original visual language incorporating both the biennial and the texture of Mardin.
Bridge Between Idea and Observation
Artist & Workshop Leader: Ridvan Asar
Venue: International Design Foundation Children’s Culture House
The workshop titled Bridge Between Idea and Observation is designed within the framework of the Mardin Biennial’s “Sky and Ground” theme. Inspired by Raphael Sanzio’s famous fresco The School of Athens (1509–1511), created in the Vatican, the workshop focuses on two different modes of thinking represented by Plato and Aristotle.
Participants comparatively examine Plato’s philosophy based on the world of ideas and Aristotle’s approach grounded in observation and experience, while reflecting on how these perspectives relate to the concepts of “earth” and “sky.”
The workshop aims to support children’s critical inquiry, observation, interpretation, and conceptual thinking skills.
The Place I See / The Place I Build
Artist & Workshop Leader: Büsra Akgeyik
Venue: City Tour – International Design Foundation Children’s Culture House
Is the city merely an environment made of stone and plans, or is it a living space recreated through every gaze? The Place I See / The Place I Build seeks the answer to this question within children’s free and boundless perceptions.
Connected to the 7th Mardin Biennial’s theme “SKYground,” the workshop invites children to create new settlements and meanings between the gravity of the earth and the infinity of the sky.
Each production emerging through this process becomes a trace left by the child in the city and a proposal regarding the environment they inhabit. The collective installation formed at the end of the workshop becomes an aesthetic expression of children declaring: “I am here, and I am rebuilding the city.”
Centering children’s right to see and express, the workshop calls for rethinking the city through their perspective.
The Place I See / The Place I Build
Artist & Workshop Leader: Hesen Chalak
Venue: City Tour – International Design Foundation Children’s Culture House
This workshop aims to help participants become familiar with the architectural texture of Mardin and establish a creative connection with this heritage. Mardin’s history, stone craftsmanship, narrow streets, crafts tradition, courtyard houses, and layered urban structure are introduced both visually and experientially. A visual presentation related to the subject is provided, followed by discussions with participants about the mediums used in the workshop.
Through questions and dialogue, children are encouraged to rediscover Mardin.
During the workshop, participants first gain basic knowledge about Mardin’s architecture by examining arches, windows, stone ornaments, and spatial arrangements. These observations are then transformed into artistic production through a workshop process using wood as the primary material.
Square and rectangular wooden blocks of different sizes are attached onto a plywood surface to create a composition resembling Mardin’s terraced urban structure. Drawings of Mardin Castle are added to the upper empty section. The wooden blocks are painted in the colors of Mardin’s stone houses, while windows and flowers are drawn using acetate markers. Swallows, sparrows, and pigeons are added to the sky.
At the end of the workshop, each participant creates a miniature Mardin to hang in their own room. Beyond being an art activity, the workshop serves as a learning experience that allows children to rediscover the city they live in.
Talk & Towards the Clouds
Artist & Workshop Leader: Bawer Doganay
Venue: Kiziltepe Ates Beyler Bathhouse Biennial Exhibition Space
This art workshop aims to help children connect with nature, make observations, and create through imagination.
The process begins with an exhibition tour, followed by conversations and observation activities focused on birds, especially swallows.
A short awareness exercise held outdoors encourages children to carefully observe their surroundings and natural forms. In the final stage of the workshop, participants create swallow collages on canvas, producing their own original artworks.
The workshop aims to support observation, creative thinking, visual storytelling, and individual expression skills.
Tracing the Water
Artist & Workshop Leader: Ceren Solmaz
Venue: International Design Foundation Children’s Culture House
The children’s workshop titled Tracing the Water is designed around the conceptual framework of the Mardin Biennial’s “SKYground” theme. The workshop approaches water as a transformative element that travels from sky to ground, moves continuously, and leaves traces on every surface it touches.
Throughout the workshop, children observe the flow, spread, and traces of water on surfaces, reinterpreting these movements through lino printmaking techniques. Each participant creates original printing surfaces representing different states of water.
At the end of the workshop, individual works are brought together to form a collective ground. In this way, children experience how different traces, perspectives, and experiences can merge on a shared surface.
The workshop aims to develop observation, surface perception, creative thinking, and visual expression skills through printmaking techniques.