Chan­tal Za­kari

Most Recent Affiliation(s):

• Artist

ISEA Bio(s) Available:

• ISEA2011

  Chan­tal Za­kari is a Turk­ish-Lev­an­tine, a mem­ber of the Chris­t­ian mi­nor­ity. Her ed­u­ca­tion since child­hood was filled with pro­pa­gan­dis­tic im­ages of Atatürk de­signed to per­son­ify a sense of na­tional iden­tity. As an artist, now liv­ing in the U.S., she has a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. Za­kari was trained as a de­signer and an artist. She pub­lished The Turk & The Jew, in 1998 with Man­del, a book based on the web-nar­ra­tive by the same title, which was launched in 1996. In 2005, using a pseu­do­nym, she self-pub­lished we­bAf­fairs, a doc­u­men­tary of a web com­mu­nity. She has had solo shows of her work in the U.S. and in Turkey. She has given book read­ings in the form of per­for­mances in the U.K., Nether­lands, Canada and the U.S. Za­kari is a fac­ulty mem­ber in the Text and Image Arts Area at The School of the Mu­seum of Fine Arts, Boston, US.

  Bio 2 (2011)

  Chan­tal Za­kari is a Turk­ish-Lev­an­tine artist and a re­cent U.S. cit­i­zen. She re­ceived her MFA from the School of the Art In­sti­tute of Chicago where she was trained as a de­signer and an artist. She pub­lished The Turk & The Jew, in 1998 with Mike Man­del, a book based on the web-nar­ra­tive by the same title, which was launched in 1996. In 2005, using a pseu­do­nym, she self-pub­lished we­bAf­fairs, a doc­u­men­tary of a web com­mu­nity. From 1997 to 2010, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Man­del she co-wrote, pho­tographed and de­signed The State of Ata: The Con­tested Im­agery of Power in Turkey, a vi­sual book about the so­cial themes that de­fine con­tem­po­rary Turkey and that specif­i­cally ex­am­ines the im­agery of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, its rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader after WWI. His­to­rian and au­thor Eti­enne Co­peaux, de­fined the book as “an en­cy­clo­pe­dic re­search of the semi­ol­ogy of power re­la­tion­ships in Turkey”. She has had solo shows of her work in the U.S. and in Turkey and her books are in the col­lec­tion of Brook­lyn Mu­seum of Art, Yale Uni­ver­sity, In­sti­tute of net­work Cul­tures, Getty Re­search In­sti­tute, The Kin­sey In­sti­tute Li­brary and many pri­vate col­lec­tions.