Ahmet Öğüt | neither artificial nor intelligent | A plus A Gallery

Ahmet Öğüt

neither artificial nor intelligent

preview 6th November, 6pm

6th November 2025 - 8th February 2026 

A plus A Gallery, Venice

Ahmet Öğüt, widely recognized for his participatory and socially engaged projects, returns to Venice after representing Turkey at the Venice Biennale in 2009 with a new body of work that brings to light his rarely explored painting practice. Titled neither artificial nor intelligent, the exhibition features a previously unseen selection of ten oil portraits from a larger series of fifty, created over the past three years. The works will be on view exclusively on-site at A plus A Gallery from November 6, 2025, to February 8, 2026. Images of the artworks will be made available online only once they are no longer in the artist’s possession. Until then, the show offers a fully in-person viewing experience, genuine and free from digital mediation.

The 70x70cm canvases depict both fictional and real artists, each with diverse practices and from various cities that are not disclosed to the viewer. Why do we associate a particular face with a specific place or type of art? What biases influence our interpretation of an image? Neither artificial nor intelligent invites an offline and individual encounter with the portrayed artists, figures who rarely receive institutional recognition due to their political status and origins, within a western classificatory system also deeply rooted in the filtering structures of artificial intelligence.

The title of the series is gifted from Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford (Yale University Press, 2021), in which the author traces how artificial intelligence, often perceived as abstract and detached from human input, is actually the cause of tangible and lasting damage such as war, environmental degradation, and social inequality. Drawing from the historical context outlined in the book about control over facial recognition technologies, from phrenology to unauthorized mass data collection, to today’s intelligent vision training techniques, the exhibition questions how technological progress still relies on inherently flawed classification methods shaped by human bias and systems of power.

Born in Silvan, Diyarbakir, Ahmet Öğüt completed his BA from the Fine Arts Faculty at Hacettepe University, Ankara, MA from Art and Design Faculty at Yıldız Teknik University, Istanbul. He works across different media and has exhibited widely, more recently with solo exhibitions in institutions including Art on the Underground & New Contemporaries, Van Abbemuseum, State of Concept Athens, Kunstverein Dresden, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Chisenhale Gallery; Berkeley Art Museum; and Kunsthalle Basel. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including; Singapore Biennale (2025); Sense of Safety, Yermilov Centre Kharkiv (2024); Dhaka Art Summit (2023); 17th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, (2022); FRONT International 2022, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Ohio (2022); Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone (2021); In the Presence of Absence, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020); Zero Gravity at Nam SeMA, Seoul Museum of Art (2019); Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale (2018); the British Art Show 8 (2015-2017); the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); Performa 13, the Fifth Biennial of Visual Art Performance, New York (2013); the 7th Liverpool Biennial (2012); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); the New Museum Triennial, New York (2009); and the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2008).

Öğüt was awarded the Visible Award for the Silent University (2013); the special prize of the Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Ukraine (2012); the De Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs 2011, Netherlands; and the Kunstpreis Euro- pas Zukunft, Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany (2010). He co-represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). Lives and works in Amsterdam and Istanbul. His works in institutional collections such as Guggenheim Museum New York; Kadist, San Francisco, US - Paris; Rennie Collection, Vancouver; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Frans Hals Museum; FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkerque; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis; KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing; Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul.

Ahmet Öğüt

neither artificial nor intelligent

preview 6th November, 6pm

6th November 2025 - 8th February 2026 A

plus A Gallery, Venice

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