Cultural Events Coordinator
Saint-Joseph French High School
2017–2025, Istanbul

Between 2017 and 2025, Gizem Karakas worked as Cultural Events Coordinator at Istanbul Private Saint-Joseph French High School, where she developed a program at the intersection of pedagogy, contemporary art, and public engagement. Conceived as an extension of her artistic practice, this role involved creating and sustaining spaces for dialogue, collaboration, and collective thinking within and beyond the institution.

Her responsibilities encompassed both the design of internal activities for students (workshops, lectures, and encounters with artists, curators, and researchers) and the programming of the school’s public cultural events. Through this dual framework, she established sustained exchanges between the school’s internal community (students, teachers, administration) and Istanbul’s cultural scene.

She approached the institution not as a closed educational space but as an active site of production and discourse. Over time, she contributed to positioning the school as a visible and sustained platform for contemporary artistic practices by initiating collaborations with cultural institutions including the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), Arter, and Yapı Kredi Art Gallery; coordinating a writer residency (2017–2021); and initiating an artist residency program (2023–2025), conceived as platforms for exchange between students and invited practitioners.

Among these initiatives, Açık Seminer (2019–2021), developed with the independent initiative poşe and Murat Alat, and structured as a free and public program, foregrounded forms of knowledge production that unfold outside formal academic frameworks. Alongside exhibitions and residency programs, it contributed to establishing the school as a sustained site for interdisciplinary exchange.

A central aspect of her work involved opening the school’s resources - its spaces, archives, and institutional networks - to artists and cultural practitioners, enabling forms of collaboration grounded in exchange, experimentation, and collective learning.

Following the 2023 earthquake in Turkey, she initiated a solidarity framework through Açık Akşam, transforming the public program into a fundraising platform in collaboration with the Educational Volunteers Foundation of Turkey (TEGV). This shift mobilized the school’s existing cultural network to support students affected by the disaster.

Across these initiatives, Karakas developed a practice of institutional mediation grounded in facilitation, relational thinking, and long-term collaboration, articulating pedagogical space as a site for collective inquiry and artistic production.