Pigeons are People

Art-ist Publications represents the most innovative and critical discourse on contemporary art in Turkey to emerge since the momentum of development seen in the local art scene during the 1990s. Each publication aims to create debate-oriented content that will help to produce and record memory in order to offer a unique form of knowledge on the art situation and artistic production of Art-ist Publications' context.

The Contemporary Artist Books series is dedicated to this purpose and aims to create a space for artists and their peers to think deliberately about the very unique and inventive aspects of contemporary artistic practices. Artist Books offers the ideal form for seeing a body of work by a single artist, and for recognizing continuities and phases in each particular artist?s practice as well as in relation to the broader art community. The books in this series of publications look upon one artists' work as broadly as possible to include images, texts, interviews as well as reviews, which together present a deep and meaningful insight into personal artistic achievements.

Art-ist Publications launched the Artist Book series in 2008 with Ahmet Ö?üt's ?Informal Incidents? and in 2009 followed up with Bashir Borlakov's ?Fictional Reality?. The third publication in the series opened an invitation to Can Altay and the result is "Pigeons are People".

Can Altay is known for his creative experiments that are built around the concept of space and scale in ways that are not commonly explored in the Turkish art scene. Along with his internationally acknowledged works on the ?minibar? phenomena and Turkey's urban paper gatherers, this publication includes works that question the nature of art galleries and the place of art in city life. Altay explores our relationships with places and changing locations, mobile elements of a city that were never predicted by planning, and alternative experiences that can be manifested within the urban sphere. Just as he pays attention to alternative, collective social productions that reshape our cities, Altay also looks for art in the public environment. In many cases, he gives back to us that which is already there, but attempts to expand the limits of our understanding by introducing additional research on society's perception of what at first glance may appear to be mundane or simple improvisational activities. Maintaining a firm grip on irony, his art and this book develop spaces for us to debate how we look, comprehend and explore our environment, and more often than not he also shows us how quickly we chose to ignore some of the most intriguing happenings that occur every day on our own doorsteps. (Sureyyya Evren)