Ali Güreli is an entrepreneur, cultural leader and founder and chairman of Contemporary Istanbul, one of the region’s leading contemporary art fairs. For over two decades, he has championed Istanbul as a global hub for artistic exchange, bringing together artists, institutions, collectors and international audiences. Working at the intersection of art, culture and urban development, Güreli brings valuable insight into the role of creativity in fostering dialogue, shaping cultural identity and building connections across borders.
Anders Petterson is the founder and CEO of ArtTactic Ltd, a London-based art market research and analysis company established in 2001. A pioneer in using crowd-sourcing techniques to gather art market intelligence, ArtTactic publishes global reports in collaboration with partners including Deloitte, Hiscox, Mishcon de Reya, Sophie Macpherson SML, and Sotheby’s. Anders regularly lectures on art market topics at Sotheby’s Institute, Christie’s Education, and ESA Beirut, and served as a founding board member of PAIAM from 2011 to 2021.
Chimere Cissé is an art collector and founder with over a decade of experience in the cultural sector. She launched ArtKōrero in 2021 to connect commercial engagement with the arts and recently founded STELLA Alliance to increase the visibility of women art collectors. Previously, she represented the United Nations International Trade Centre and held senior roles at Burberry, Hearst UK, Harper’s Bazaar, and ELLE. Dedicated to philanthropy, she actively supports global charities including the British Council and Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation, where she is a long-standing committee chair.
Divya Sharma is a London-based British Indian textile artist and an alumna of the Royal College of Art, London. Her practice brings together myth, memory, and the cultural world of her mother tongue, Tamil. She was recently awarded the Visual Artists Association International Scholarship Award for 2025. She has conceived and curated five shows as founder of The Neulinge Collective and the Post-Colonials Collective. She is also the founder and host of the ARTiculate podcast and broadcasts on Apple Podcasts.
Dr. Shwetal Patel is a writer and researcher working at the intersection of contemporary visual art, exhibition-making, and development studies. A founding member of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, he played a key role in launching the initiative and building its international partnerships. He holds a practice-based PhD from the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, and lectures internationally at institutions such as the Zürich University of the Arts, the Royal College of Art, and the University of Exeter. He also serves as trustee for the Milton Keynes Museum, Coventry Biennial, and the Kakar Centre of Psychoanalysis & Culture.
Jeffrey Boloten is Director of Art Business and Enterprise Programmes at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. He co-founded and serves as Managing Director of ArtInsight Ltd., the educational partner of art market research firm ArtTactic. With a background in law, publishing (including Penguin Books), and institutional roles at the Tate and a London art college, Jeffrey is a frequent speaker on the global art, photography, and art investment markets. He also co-directs Sotheby’s Enterprise Studio and is a founding member of PAIAM (Professional Advisors to the International Art Market).
Leo Crane is a producer, artist and educator with over 25 years of experience across physical and digital creative industries. He has founded three creative studios and in 2024, established the AI Film Academy, focusing on innovation in contemporary moving image practice. He leads courses in art and art business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and serves on the board of Animate Projects. His artistic practice spans animated film, figurative painting and experimental digital works, and his work has been widely exhibited, screened and awarded internationally. He is currently producing his debut feature film The Masterpiece of Tamagata, and is the author of Contemporary Figures in Watercolour (2021).
Mark Davy is the founder of Futurecity, a multidisciplinary agency dedicated to culture-driven placemaking. He has led private sector investment in major art projects including the Crossrail Culture Line, the Illuminated River Project, and the cultural strategy for Wembley Park. Mark is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and contributes to several boards and panels, including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Advisory Panel, Hypha Studios, the Land Economic Society, the NLA Expert Panel for Culture, and the National Trust Regional Advisory Group.
Marta Orsola Sironi is a curator and critic based between Milan and London. She is co-founder and curator of MEGA Art Fair, which reimagines the art fair as an immersive, curated experience activating regenerated urban spaces with exhibitions, performances, talks, and music. Together with Mauro Mattei, she co-directs BeAdvisors Art Department, producing curated shows, cultural events, and collectors’ programmes across international art calendars. Her research focuses on decolonial feminism, identity, language, and memory, with a strong interest in urban space as a site of resistance.
Nicole Schoeni is an art dealer, collector, patron, and founder of Schoeni Projects. Previously, Nicole was the director of Schoeni Art Gallery, one of Asia's most influential art venues. Nicole has since curated the Hong Kong section of the China 8 exhibition and has consulted on arts projects such as for the Grand Lisboa Palace in Macau. She is an active patron of numerous foundations, is on the advisory team for Arts for Good Foundation, and sits on the Board of Directors of Asian Art in London.
Portuguese visual artist Paulo Arraiano explores the intersections of art, culture, nature, and technology through a multidisciplinary practice. He is co-founder of Re_Act Contemporary, an international art laboratory and residency programme based in the Azores that fosters dialogue between artists, researchers, and communities around pressing ecological, social, and cultural issues. Arraiano offers a distinctive perspective on the role of art in shaping how we understand and engage with a rapidly changing world. Portfolio
Rena Neville is Director of Corinth Consulting Ltd and Head of FCS Compliance Art Division. With over 30 years at Sotheby’s, she was the company’s first Global Compliance Director and previously served as European General Counsel and Global Head of Litigation. Today, she advises the art market on anti-money laundering compliance and is a frequent speaker on the subject, including recent talks at Harvard Law School and the Art Business Conference in Maastricht during TEFAF.
Roxane Zand is a Harvard and Oxford educated specialist in Middle Eastern art and culture. After three years at UNESCO and roles at the Iran Heritage Foundation and Asia House, she joined Sotheby’s in 2006 as Director for the Middle East and Gulf, rising to Deputy Chairman and Senior Director, before stepping down in 2020 to lead her own art advisory consultancy. She continues to serve as Arts Editor for the Encyclopaedia Islamica, advises through the Pictet Art Prize Advisory Council, and has authored several publications, including Geometry and Art: In the Modern Middle East.
Sigrid Kirk is a curator, adviser, and strategist who co-founded the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA) in 2016. AWITA brings together women working across the arts sector through mentoring, collaboration, and a shared community. In addition, each year Kirk and her husband collaborate with Te Tuhi Gallery in Auckland to help fund an artist residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park for Māori and Pacific Island artists. The couple are also patrons of Dundee Contemporary Arts,  Fruitmarket Gallery, Gasworks, Studio Voltaire, Iniva, and Goldsmiths CCA.
Sylwia Krason is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Lynx Magazine, an international arts publication and organisation based in London. Since 2013, she has connected bold artistic voices with global audiences, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe and emerging markets. She is also President of the Contemporary Lynx Foundation in Warsaw and regularly serves as a juror and panel moderator at major international art events, including Art Basel. Trained in art history and arts management in Kraków, Berlin, and London, she is currently based in Paris.
Ulrich Schrauth is a curator, artist, and creative director of UBS Digital Art Museum in Hamburg. Schrauth is also the founder of VRHAM! Biennale, shaping new ways of presenting and experiencing digital Art. Working between Hamburg and London, he also heads the Immersive Programme at the British Film Institute (BFI) and serves on the British Council’s Advisory Board for Arts and Creative Economy. In addition, he curates the digital section of Art Dubai, the premier international art fair for digital media. Ulrich is a jury member for prestigious awards such as the Lumen Prize and the Fedora Digital Art Prize, and is a regular speaker at major events including the Venice Biennale, SXSW, and the Cannes Film Festival. Portfolio

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Symbolic Vault: Exhibition & Opening Reception

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  • Exhibition
  • RSVP Required for Opening event

Where nature, technology and human experience become entangled. 

Exhibition Details

🗓️ Dates:
18 September – 24 October 2026

Opening Reception: 18 September

📍Location:
Vault level, Kasa Gallery, Istanbul

🎨 Artists: Paulo Arraiano · Rebecca Najdowski · Ecem Dilan Köse

 

Visitor Experience 

  • Immersion in layered soundscapes and shifting visual environments
  • Reorientation as familiar boundaries between natural and artificial blur
  • Connection to nonhuman rhythms

This September, step beneath the streets of Istanbul and into Kasa Gallery’s underground former bank vault for Symbolic Vault: Entanglements of Human, Nature, Machine, an exhibition bringing together three artists from around the world.

Presented by Art Voyage in collaboration with Kasa Gallery, the exhibition features works by Paulo Arraiano, Rebecca Najdowski and Ecem Dilan Köse.

Through moving image, sound, installation, performance and digital media, the three artists explore how technology, ecology and memory are reshaping the ways we perceive, understand and inhabit the world.

Step Inside Symbolic Vault

What happens when technology is no longer separate from nature? When machines begin to perceive, landscapes become data, and intelligence extends beyond the human?

Symbolic Vault invites visitors into immersive environments where perception is continually reshaped and new ways of sensing the world begin to emerge.

Rather than presenting static objects, the artworks unfold through rhythm, process, and interaction, drawing on living systems, ecological processes, digital technologies, and human gesture.

Together, they explore the evolving entanglements between human, nature, and machine, imagining a symbiotic world where boundaries dissolve and meaning emerges through interdependence and continual exchange.

Why Symbolic Vault?

Symbolic Vault began with a simple question: what if a space once built to protect material wealth could hold entirely different forms of value?

Bringing together three artists working across ecology, technology and perception, the exhibition transforms Kasa Gallery’s former bank vault into a space for memory, sound, ecological traces and digital intelligence. Their works create unexpected connections and open up possibilities for how human, natural and technological systems might coexist.

At a moment when artificial intelligence, environmental change and technological development are reshaping our relationship with the world, Symbolic Vault asks us to reconsider what we perceive, what we preserve and, ultimately, what we value.

“Rather than understanding the vault as a secure container, the project approaches it as a contested territory where memory, ritual, mythology and power continuously negotiate one another.

The vault ceases to function as architecture and becomes a political technology, one that regulates not only objectsbut also the conditions through which knowledge is preserved, forgotten or rendered invisible.”

Paulo Arraiano, participating artist

A Bank Vault Reimagined

Hidden beneath Kasa Gallery, the former bank vault gives the exhibition its physical and conceptual starting point.

Once designed to safeguard material wealth, the Vault now holds more intangible forms of value: memory, sound, ecological traces, images and digital intelligence.

Its architecture is more than a backdrop. The underground chambers become part of the exhibition itself, transforming a space once associated with security, storage and material value into a place for experimentation, perception and exchange.

What does a vault hold when material wealth disappears?

In an era shaped by ecological instability, artificial intelligence and rapidly evolving technologies, Symbolic Vault invites us to imagine new forms of coexistence, where ecological processes, human experience, and machine intelligence are understood as part of the same evolving network.

Three artists, three perspectives

 Paulo Arraiano, Rebecca Najdowski and Ecem Dilan Köse each offer a distinct perspective on the shifting boundaries between the organic and the technological. Their practices investigate the increasingly complex relationships between living systems, technological innovation and environmental change, considering how bodies, landscapes, images and algorithms shape our understanding of the world.

Across the Vault, familiar distinctions begin to blur: organic and artificial, physical and digital, human and non-human. Rather than positioning technology in opposition to nature, the exhibition asks what becomes possible when we understand these systems as deeply entangled.

Rebecca Najdowski

Rebecca Najdowski is an American/Australian artist whose work examines imaging technologies, the mediation of nature, and visualisations of the climate emergency. Rebecca engages with the material and political implications of representing nature through photographic technologies. Using analog and digital materials — often counter to their intended use — her artworks offer alternative modes to habitual ways of seeing, and sensing, more-than-human nature.

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Paulo Arraiano

Paulo Arraiano is a visual artist whose practice explores the intersections of body, landscape, and technology. Paulo’s research relates to the idea of visual seismography, assessing surges concerning new natural, social and cultural paradigms. This artistic production interweaves with his research which involves matter and antimatter, and engages the body, the landscape and technology to address questions concerning climate changes, biosphere, extinction, transhumanism and the anthropocene.

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Ecem Dilan Köse 

Ecem Dilan Köse is a Turkish conceptual digital artist whose practice bridges organic textures and digital data. Drawing on her background in architecture, she works across installation, AI, VR, AR, sculpture, and audio-visual performance to explore the evolving relationships between human, ecological, and virtual realms. In 2024, she received the İşbank Artificial Intelligence Factory Competition Award alongside Refik Anadol, recognising her innovative use of artificial intelligence in contemporary art.

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Join us this september

Opening during Istanbul’s September art season, Symbolic Vault brings together international artistic perspectives within one of the city’s most distinctive contemporary art spaces.

Join us for the Exhibition Opening on 18 September 2026 and be among the first to experience the exhibition alongside the artists and Art Voyage community.

Book Here to reserve your place at the exhibition opening reception. 

Special Events: Beyond the Exhibition

Explore Events

VIP Exhibition Opening Reception 

18 September 2026
Kasa Gallery Vaults

Step deeper into Symbolic Vault for an exclusive opening reception in Kasa Gallery’s historic underground vaults. Experience the exhibition after hours, encounter works across moving image, sound and installation, meet the artists and curator, and continue the evening over drinks with Istanbul’s international community of collectors, curators, patrons and art professionals.

Panel Discussion on Art, Technology and Future Ecologies

23 September 2026
Venue TBC

What happens when we begin to perceive the world beyond the human? Join us for an evening of ideas, exchange and conversation during Istanbul’s September art season.

 

Bringing together artists, curators and academics, this panel explores how art responds to emerging technologies, ecological change and non-human forms of perception. 

VIP Curated Exhibition Tour

24 September 2026
Kasa Gallery Vaults

Go behind the works with an intimate guided tour offering guests a closer encounter with the exhibition and the extraordinary underground space in which it unfolds.
Hear directly from the curator and artists as they reveal the processes, ideas and questions behind the works, exploring the intersections of ecology, technology and the evolving relationships between humans, machines and the natural world.

Be inspired, consider new ways of sensing and thinking. 
Reflect on the meanings and implications of interdependence, ecology, and technology. Gain new understandings about climate, AI, and post-human futures; through empathy, awareness, and new forms of entangled thinking rooted in interdependence and symbiosis.

Visit Kasa Gallery’s Symbolic Vault to experience an unforgettable, multi-sensory, immersive exhibition that challenges perceptions of human, nature, and machine relationships.

Visit Kasa Gallery

Events 

VIP Exhibition Opening Reception with Contemporary Istanbul

Date : September 18th 

Venue : Kasa Gallery Vaults 

Learn more

Kasa Gallery and Art Voyage Biennial CIC are delighted to invite Contemporary Istanbul VIP guests to an exclusive opening of Symbolic Vault: Entanglements of Human, Nature, Machine, followed by a drinks reception in Kasa Gallery’s historic underground vaults.

he evening offers Contemporary Istanbul’s international collectors, curators, patrons and arts professionals the opportunity to experience the exhibition before the public programme, meet the artists and curator, and continue conversations over drinks in one of Istanbul’s most distinctive contemporary art venues.

VIP Curated Tours with Contemporary Istanbul

Date : September 24th 

Venue : Kasa Gallery Vaults 

Learn more

As part of Contemporary Istanbul’s VIP programme, Art Voyage Biennial CIC is pleased to invite collectors, curators, arts professionals and invited guests to an exclusive guided tour of Symbolic Vault at Kasa Gallery. 

Led by curator Tima Jam alongside exhibiting artists Paulo Arraiano and Ecem Dilan Köse, the tour offers a behind-the-scenes introduction to the exhibition, exploring its themes of ecology, technology, and the evolving relationship between humans, machines and the natural world through installation, moving image and sound.

Panel Discussion on Art, Technology and Future Ecologies

Date : September 23rd 

Venue : Soho House Istanbul 

Learn more

Coinciding with Symbolic Vault, an international exhibition at Kasa Gallery presented by Art Voyage Biennial CIC, Soho House Istanbul will host an exclusive evening of discussion and networking exploring the relationship between art, technology and the more-than-human world.

Taking place during Istanbul’s September art season, a panel discussion titled “Post-Human Perception: Seeing and Hearing Beyond Ourselves” will bring together leading artists, curators and academics to examine how contemporary art responds to emerging technologies, ecological change and shifting ideas of perception. 

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If you are an artist interested in collaborating with us, or if you would like to learn more about the work we do at Art Voyage, email us at info@artvoyagebiennial.org.uk

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By donating, you’re not just funding a project, you’re becoming part of a movement that celebrates and empowers artists, and transforms public spaces into places of memory, creativity, and pride.

Together, we can ensure that all stories matter.

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