Yusuf Barbaros / Independent Artist & Economic Sociologist
Art, in my opinion, is the purest form of communication with one's inner self as well as one's environment.
I was born in Istanbul, as a child of two visual artists whose art careers were interrupted by the intense political polarization and economic crises in Turkey. Because of their frustration at being disconnected from their passion, they discouraged me from studying art at university. I was neither able to blame nor forgive them because of our emotional disconnection. Rather, I have studied economics and sociology and focused on socio-economic and political malfunctions in order to build a career in which I can contribute to policies that empower artists and other precarious communities. Therefore, I am currently writing on my thesis on the NFT art market, to evaluate the potentials of contemporary technological innovations in the context of empowerment of the artists. In addition to that, I have never stopped working on my art besides it.
Art, in my opinion, is the purest form of communication with one's inner self as well as one's environment. As a matter of fact, I regularly create self-portraits and use various techniques to portray my friends and family. In addition, I try to take benefit of art's meditative power by committing to artistic experiments in my drawings. I attempted to put all of the moral, political, ontological, and epistemological aspects of the theories I had learned in my social science studies to the test using my own aesthetic judgments in my artistic world.
Education
2014 - 2019
B.A. Economics, Marmara University
2020 - 2022
M.A. Social Sciences, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg