What a Museum Should Really Look Like

Serkan Özkaya has primarily encountered Western art works in books and magazines before experiencing them in person. This encounter shaped his entire oeuvre, in which replication and appropriation assume a central importance. Özkaya focuses on concepts such as the tension between the original and the copy; the institutionalising of a work of art; and strategies of liberating the work from the institutional context into everyday life. He challenges the ways in which a work of art is monetised in the art market via uniqueness and artificial scarcity, and develops works that can be reproduced ad infinitum without losing their value.

His large-scale installation "What a Museum Should Really Look Like", which debuted at the Yapı Kredi Cultural Centre’s Kazım Taşkent Art Gallery in 2000, consisted of approximately 33.000 slides collected from various institutions and people in Istanbul. In this work, the artist surpasses the spacial and temporal limitations of the gallery space and manages to open the work from inside out. Özkaya recomposed What a Museum Should Really Look Like for Arter Collection and brought together 44.000 slides he obtained from various museums and galleries. The work questions the exclusivity, and therefore also the inclusivity, of today’s art world.