ANNA LAUDEL

Booth G13

A multidisciplinary artist, guerilla street hacker and semi-digital mediator, Cem Sonel also calls himself a mathematical observer. Having spent most of his life on the streets, he considers them his main production area. They constitute a major influential element in his earlier work. Born in Ankara in 1985, Sonel completed his undergraduate education at Hacettepe University at the Faculty of Fine Arts, from which he received his degree in Graphic Design with Honors. In 2009 he co-founded the street art collective KÜF Project, thereby realising a long-standing dream of his and the opportunity to keep working in the environment of his choice. The guerrilla street art actions the collective carried out between the years of 2009 and 2014 gained widespread attention both from the media as well as the urban population. Sonel was accepted into the Sculpture Master’s Program at Hacettepe University Fine Arts Institute in 2014. After completing his studies, he moved his workshop to Izmir-Darağaç in 2017, continuing his own work as well as the activities with various street art collectives. Sonel’s artworks have been exhibited in many national and international organisations and events such as Berlin Art Week, Contemporary Istanbul, Sónar Festival and 48 Stunden Neukölln. He organized workshops on street art in many universities of Turkiye and was invited to panels as a speaker. He also regularly hosted his own workshop sessions. He was the first artist in Turkiye to exhibit a semi-digital mural, which he presented to the public at the mural arts festival in Istanbul. In 2022, he held his first solo exhibition titled „One and Zero Makes Two“ at Anna Laudel Gallery in Istanbul. Integrating new media and digital art into street art has been the dominating theme in his work.

Anna Laudel, founded in 2012, has locations in the cities of Istanbul, Düsseldorf and Bodrum respectively. Since the gallery´s opening, Anna Laudel has developed a strong standing among leading dynamic contemporary art centres regionally and internationally and is representing a roster of artists with diverse social, cultural and educational backgrounds. It is of importance to the gallery to maintain consistency in the diversity of the roster of artists represented, so as to reflect the many varying dynamics and developments of the contemporary art world. Following its first location in Istanbul, Anna Laudel opened its second gallery in Düsseldorf (Germany) in 2019 to further its international outreach. Soon after, in May 2022, a third gallery was inaugurated in Bodrum, in the district of Zai Yasam, allowing for yet another audience and an interesting location to host mostly solo exhibitions.