Silva Bingaz

Silva Bingaz was born in eastern Turkey as a daughter of an Armenian family. She currently lives and works in Istanbul.

Her first serious work was the story of an Iraqi immigrant woman named Beyan on which Bingaz had worked for three years starting from 2001. At the same period in 2002, she also has started working on her ongoing project “Coast”.

Bingaz is a self-educated photographer and participated in various workshops dedicated to provide critical understanding of image making, which gave her an opportunity to work closely with major photographers in a number of countries and most notably in France. Encounters and interactions with master photographers from various countries have shaped Bingaz's understanding of the technique and aesthetics of photography and her awareness of contemporary trends in the medium.

Selections from Bingaz's project “Coast” were shown Depo in Istanbul in 2007, at the Kalfayan Gallery in Thessaloniki, Greece in 2008, as well as at Istanbul Modern as a part of the “Uncanny Encounters“ exhibition in 2011.

She took part in “EU Women”, a project presented in 2007 in Lodz, Paris, Sevilla, and New York. Bingaz also participated in the exhibition “Mahalle / Neighbourhood” organized as a part of the Portable Art Project of the 2010 Istanbul European Capital of Culture Agency. Same year, she was invited to the Japanese city Tottori as one of the photographers selected each year from a European Capital of Culture to take part in the EU-Japan Fest cultural exchange program “European Eyes on Japan”. Her Tottori project was published as a book in Japan and exhibited in Japan as well as in Istanbul as a part of Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture.

She was commissioned by Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton to create new body of work called 'Insider' to take part in an exhibition titled 'Journeys. Wanderings in contemporary Turkey', along with some other major contemporary artists from Turkey in 2012. A comprehensive selection from her Japan works - including some new photographs from 2011- was shown as an exhibition entitled ‘Coast of the East’ at Pilevneli Project at the beginning of 2013, which was the third exhibit of her work on Japan. Her work on Japan was published with the name “Japan Coast” by André Frère Éditions in 2014.

She was commissioned by a contemporary culture magazine Norgunk to document Balat, a neighbourhood in the historical peninsula of Istanbul. This work was shown by Tankut Öktem Gallery in 2015, in Istanbul. In the same year, she was invited to "Meadow of the Tempest", which is Ariel Sanat's debut exhibition, and exhibited her daughter Vartuhi's photographs.

Her solo exhibition “Loss” -devoted to her beloved Nadir- took place in Empire Project gallery in the spring of 2017. At the same time, similtaneously, she participated with photographs of Vartuhi and Nadiri in a group show "Critical Distance" at Ariel Sanat. After these exhibitions, she visited Latvia for the production of her new project.

While continuing her work titled "Istanbul and Its Painters", which she started in 2018, her project "Beyan" was shown with different installation by displaying contact sheets of the work as well.

She is currently working on publishing a book on her ongoing project “Coast”.