A Bit
About Me
Dilara Tekin is an Istanbul-based architect, designer, and researcher working across exhibition making, spatial design, and research. With a background in architecture from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and Istanbul Technical University, her work moves between built environments, exhibitions, and research-led projects across cultural and institutional contexts.
Since 2015, she has focused on exhibition design while continuing to work on spatial projects at different scales and in different formats. Her practice includes exhibition design and coordination as well as spatial design for installations, interiors, and site-specific projects, developed through both independent collaborations and institutional work.
In 2015, she co-founded Atölye Mil with Eda Özgener — an interdisciplinary platform exploring the intersections of architecture, art, and production through exhibitions, workshops, and collaborative research.
She lives and works in Istanbul.
PhD
Her doctoral research, Exhibition Narrative in the Expanded Field: Garanti Gallery Case, takes Rosalind Krauss’s Sculpture in the Expanded Field as a point of departure for developing a diagrammatic model for reading exhibition narrative through space. It establishes two axes: ways of relating to exhibition space and forms of spatiality associated with different levels of experience, from visual perception to spatial experience.
The diagram approaches exhibition narrative both as an object to be mapped and as a mapping device for tracing the ambiguous spatialities it produces. The diagrammatic model thus raises the question of whether, as narrative becomes spatialized in exhibitions, existing space itself may begin to dematerialize, opening ambiguous spatialities.