Ebru Kurbak (TR/AT)

Ebru Kurbak is an artist born in Izmir, Turkey, and based in Vienna, Austria. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she leads her long-term arts-based research project The Museum of Lost Technology, awarded an Elise-Richter-PEEK Grant by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). 

Kurbak’s work critically explores the entanglements between art, technology, culture, and power. A major trajectory in her practice investigates the historical, social, and spatial segregation of knowledges under colonial modernity, engaging particularly with the largely undervalued string- and fiber-based technologies rooted in women’s, Indigenous, nomadic, and prehistoric cultures.

Kurbak has held residencies at leading art and art-and-technology institutions including La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris, FR); V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, NL); LABoral Cultural Center (Gijón, ES); NIROX (Krugersdorp, ZA); 18th Street Arts Center (Los Angeles, US); and EYEBEAM (New York, US). Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, AT), ZKM (Karlsruhe, DE), SIGGRAPH (US), Microwave Festival (Hong Kong, HK), Istanbul Design Biennial (Istanbul, TR), Piksel Festival (Bergen, NO), and MAK – Museum of Applied Arts Vienna (Vienna, AT), among others. Kurbak received the LACMA Art + Technology Grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019.