With over 20 years of international experience, Istanbul Modern’s Chief Curator Öykü Özsoy has held various positions in exhibitions, art projects, programs and publications at museums and art institutions including Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, SALT, Istanbul; Intercult, Sweden; Wilhelm-Hack- Museum and Heidelberger Kunstverein in Germany. Currently the Chief Curator at Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Özsoy has organized the museum's artistic program, overseen museum's curatorial department, and has also served as curator since 2017. At the museum, she has curated exhibitions including “Selma Gürbüz: This Place We Call World”(2020), “The Event of a Thread” supported by Germany’s Institute for International Cultural Relations (co-curated with Susanne Weiss and Inka Gressel, 2019) and Istanbul Modern’s previous collection exhibition “In Pursuit of the Present” (2018).
Öykü Özsoy also organized exhibitions at various institutions in Istanbul including ALT Art Space, Milli Reasurans Art Galery, DEPO, Hasköy Yarn Factory as well as the Westfalicher Kunstverein, Germany and INSA Art Space, Korea. She was the co-director of the first international artist’s residency program in Turkey from 2002 through 2010 and initiated artist residency collaborations with institutions such as Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; Delfina Foundation, London; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Spike Island, Bristol.
Having written articles for exhibition catalogues and magazines, Özsoy contributed to the book Re-Orientierung / Re-Orientation, published by the Ludwig-Maximillian University and Haus der Kunst, Germany in 2018. Özsoy was awarded as an international fellow curator by Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) for the years between 2013-2015 and she was a 2019 Tate Intensive Fellow organized by Tate Modern.
