When Işın Önol started her art career in Istanbul more than two decades ago, she didn’t intend to become a curator who would weave together the memories of people across continents. At the time, she was simply a young artist with a drawer full of her own work and a growing curiosity about how art lives beyond the studio. Yet the moment she stepped into the role of director of the Elgiz Museum in Istanbul in 2006, as the city was vibrating with international attention, her path began to shift.

“I kept my own art locked away,” she recalls. “I didn’t want any conflicts of interest. Slowly, my focus moved from making art to curating it. And the world opened up.” 

What followed was a journey that reads like a cartography of contemporary art networks: South Korea for a curatorial course; Grenoble for training at L’École du Magasin, one of the field’s oldest curatorial programs; Zurich for a second master’s degree. Each place added a layer, but none felt like a destination. She was moving, always moving, toward something she couldn’t yet name. 

At Vienna Art Week 2025- photocredit Joanna Pianka 

Vienna: A City That Both Pulled and Questioned Her

Eventually, her academic path carried her to Vienna, where she began her PhD. The city unfolded slowly, beautiful, structured, and layered with histories that were not hers. That unfamiliarity became both a disorientation and a kind of liberation.

“When you don’t know the gossip or the cultural codes, a weird dynamic that happens in every city, you move freely," she says. "I wasn’t biased toward one group or another. Naivety becomes a tool, and suddenly you can enter circles you might otherwise avoid. That freedom was a gift.”

But freedom comes with its shadows. Her Turkish background, whether she wanted it or not, entered every room with her.

“You are never free from the cultural histories you represent,” she says. “I carried mine everywhere in Vienna.”

Still, Vienna became home, one of several, and a crucial anchor in her expanding world.

New York: A City Without Her Past

Years later, when she moved to New York first to join the Centre for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, then to lead Curatorial Research at the School of Visual Arts, something unexpected happened: a weight lifted. 

“In New York, I didn’t have to convince anyone that I belonged. Nobody had a real history with Turkey. Suddenly, I was just an international curator.”

Then came the irony: in the world’s most diverse city, she found herself categorised differently yet again. “They put me in this ‘white woman box,” she laughs. “Something I had never experienced in Europe.”

The realisation was disorienting and enlightening, another example of how identity shifts depending on where one stands.

At Vienna Art Week 2025- photocredit Joanna Pianka 

Memory, Storytelling, and the Politics of Solidarity

During these years of movement, Önol became part of Women Mobilising Memory, a global group of scholars and activists who examine collective memory and oral histories. This work shifted her curatorial practice toward what she calls social engagement, projects that require listening, collaboration, and humility.

“Travelling showed me how unique communities emerge everywhere,” she says. “The strategies you develop in one place can sometimes be applied in another. My work evolved completely.”

Her curatorial approach now centres on creating spaces where people can listen to each other, to artworks, to histories often spoken softly or from the margins.

“What we read in newspapers about wars is usually numbers and statistics, not through human experiences. And I think art can open another window for us to hear certain experiences that prevent us from generalising the knowledge we have, but listening to human conversation,” says Önol.

At Vienna Art Week 2025- photocredit Joanna Pianka 

Vienna Art Week: A Return with New Eyes

This November, another turning point: Önol returned to Vienna not just as a former resident, but as co-curator of Vienna Art Week, one of the city’s most significant artistic events. She developed the conceptual text and, with the artistic director, helped shape the exhibition.

“Vienna Art Week isn’t just an exhibition. It’s a festival, an ambitious one run by a remarkably small team,” she says with admiration.

She believes every exhibition must speak to its surroundings. “Imposing forms from somewhere else, that’s arrogance. If an exhibition doesn’t communicate with the city, it fails.”

In the photo: a performance at Vienna Art Week 

A World in Crisis, and the Need for Transnational Solidarity

Today, Önol sees her role as curator not only in shaping exhibitions but in nurturing solidarity across borders, across communities, even across painful histories.

“We live in a world where solidarity is vital,” she says. “We are all part of a system that exploits us artists, cultural workers, all of us. We must stand together, especially as fascism and political violence rise. Either we stand in solidarity, or we lose.”

For her, this work is particularly delicate when it involves diasporic communities.

Being an emigrant herself, she emphasises that when dealing with diaspora communities, it is crucial to understand their nuances.  “For example, for an outsider, the term Balkan diaspora may seem straightforward, but within it, there are complexities because we are discussing a region that experienced conflicts until quite recently, and even now, some issues persist.”  

She acknowledges that fostering solidarity within these groups requires considerable courage; therefore, it is essential to study their specific nuances.  

“Engaging people and their voices in the process makes everything meaningful,” she says. “It’s harder. But democracy is hard.”