Pelin Tan

Pelin Tan is the 6th recipient of Keith Haring of Art&Activism (2019). Turkish art historian and sociologist, currently a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Batman; based in Mardin/Turkiye. Senior research fellow of the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research. For more than two decades, she has focused on urban&territorial conflict, commons, labor conditions, alternative pedagogies, and methodologies in art&architecture. A Lead author of the Urban Society report by ipsp (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018). She contributed to several publications such as Climates: Architecture and The Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Univ., 2017), Refugee Heritage (2021), Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022), Designing Modernity The Arab Architecture (Jovis, 2021), From Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023), Agonistic Assemblies (Sternberg Press/MIT Press, 2024), Urgencies in Architectural Theories (Columbia Univ. Press, 2015). Her current short documentary “Landscapes as Archives” is about the production of architecture in Palestine supported by the Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (2023). With Vidokle she produced “The Fall of Artists’ Republic” in Tripoli/Lebanon (2014). Her last film “Gılgamesh: She, Who Saw the Deep” (2022) supported by the Sharjah Film Platform. Tan was invited to Montreal Biennial (2014), Bergen Assembly (2013), Lisbon Architecture Triennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2007, 2015, 2022), Istanbul Design Biennial (2021), Beijing Art Biennial (2023), Oslo Architecture Triennial (2016) and others. Forthcoming book: Forms of Non-Belonging,  E-flux book/Sternberg Press, 2025. Tan is the editor of i press, Cambridge.