YAZ Publications Book Launch / Canal Projects

at Canal Projects on Friday, October 25 from 7–9pm for a celebratory book launch and panel discussion between YAZ contributors Zeynep Öz, Dawn Chan, Hellen Ascoli and Sarah Demeuse. The YAZ Publications will be available for purchase. 

YAZ Publications are a series of 13 books consisting of artist contributions, fictional and creative texts, editorial compilations as well as book exhibitions. This collection of publications are a part of curator Zeynep Öz’s contribution to the Sharjah Biennial 16, which will take place from February 6–June 15, 2025 in the United Arab Emirates. The publication series and the exhibitions have inspired and fed into one another and some of the publication pieces have turned into spatial commissions or have otherwise left traces in the exhibitions even though the interaction has not been linear nor one-to-one. Broadly centered around the themes of the YAZ exhibitions and touching upon the idea of home and mobility in a time of accelerated technological changes and the financial (un)stable disruptions that come with them, the books bring together multiple authors to (re)imagine various past, present and future moments of transition across economic and friendship systems. The cryptography inspired design with its iridescent elements refer to the underlying importance of labor, payments, and exchange in formulating all these reconfigurations that expand through time(s).

YAZ contemplates on the shifts in societal and economic systems we experience in the present day, specifically those in response to the later stages of the accelerated changes in technology. YAZ has a double meaning in Turkish, 1. summer and 2. write/writing, and brainstorms on the modes of communication and ways of being a part of polity in this late stage of accelerated growth we find ourselves in. Looking at the not-so-newly budded but still pre-fully-mature (adolescent) financial systems as well as the new forms and modes of constituting polity, YAZ wonders what forms friendship are formulated, expanded and/or discarded in and what forms of contracts, social and/or financial, emerge during this (and earlier) transitory epoch(s). As such, it is curious as much on historical moments of accelerated scientific/technological shifts as the current moment.

The following text is quoted from Canal Projects