Gökçen Erkılıç

Gokcen Erkilic is a trans-disciplinary artist, educator, and cartographer. She is the founder of Coastliner Lab, a cartographic activism and digital solidarity initiative, born in Istanbul, against the oppression of the urbanization regime over the environment, politics, and society. Her practice focuses on mapping watery bodies and borders, borrowing perspectives from feminist geography and environmental justice. She creates collective cartographic action in conflicted anthropogenic landscapes, critical climatic zones, and marginalized landscapes. In her works she challenges traditional forms of mapping to explore their decolonial and social agency with art and technology.

Her works have been published, exhibited, and performed on various platforms globally, such as the Ethos Lab, Sharjah Biennial, Materia Arquitectura, Salt Research, Arts Letters and Numbers, Dirty Drawings, Arter, Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts, Pera Museum, and Manifold Press.

Gökçen is currently teaching at Northeastern University College of Art Media and Design’s Art+Design division. She has been a visiting researcher at Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies (2021-23). She is a graduate of Middle East Technical University, Department of Architecture in Ankara. She holds a master’s degree from Istanbul Bilgi University in Architectural and Urban Design (2012) and a PhD in Architecture and Urban Geography from Istanbul Technical University with her thesis “This is not a line”: Critical Delineation of the Coastline in Istanbul” (2019).