Pelin Tan, former ACT Fellow, has been invited as a research network committee member of the Canadian Center for Architecture CCA until 2028. Tan is a sociologist and art historian based in Mardin, Turkiye. She is a professor in the film department of the fine arts faculty at Batman University, Turkiye. In 2019 Tan was awarded the Bard College’s Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. She is a Prof. Roemer Fellow at the Orient Institute of Beirut.

Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep

A conversation in e-flux Notes
At a moment when ancient epics are again becoming material for large-scale cinematic spectacle, Film Notes publishes a conversation with Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle about their film Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep (2022), featured in the August 2026 online edition of e-flux Film’s Staff Picks. Rather than reconstructing the ancient world, the film approaches The Epic of Gilgamesh, whose earliest versions predate Homer by more than a millennium, as an unfinished work resonating in the present. Speaking with Lukas Brasiskis, Tan and Vidokle discuss the film’s making, its dialogue with Cosmism, and the cultural and political realities of southeastern Turkey.

More about the film.

Forms of Non-Belonging

Co-published by Sternberg Press and e-flux journal

Reflections on the conditions of contemporary exile, refugeehood, migration, and community building at the margins of society.

According to Pelin Tan, there are forms of belonging that do not quite belong. In this collection of essays and conversations with artists and practitioners across twenty years of research and fieldwork, she sets out to situate the conditions of contemporary exile, refugeehood, migration, and community building at the margins of society relative to the production of space, structural violence, shifting landscapes, and desecration of the environment. She also engages methodological questions integral to critical practice, including radical pedagogy, forms of commoning, non-hegemonic instituting practices, and the imagination of survival.

How can the experience of art reveal and embody the voice of apocalyptic landscapes? How can the effects of large-scale disasters be memorialized through artistic and architectural methodologies? In addressing such questions, the book aims to advance collective critical thinking by inviting the reader to engage with particular artifacts and architectures as traces of an apocalyptic era, lands as strata of violence, cycles as Earth’s navigation, and exile as a form of semi-voluntary collectivity.