Posts

Come To Tower, A Spoken Word Accompanied With Music

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An hour and twenty minutes spoken word with music performance and audio book / album, Come To Tower is  A goodbye letter and a fresh new journey.    Ayse has a unique poetic style through her combined accents and bilingual thought process and your ears recognize the sound of something that’s remarkably different, and entirely inviting, daring, exciting, and artistic in all the right ways that stand out.  Brilliantly performed in spoken-word, everything from the accent in the vocals to the slick & smooth sound of the music that comes along with it. It is interesting & enticing, and with its clever lyricism & inspiring. Ayse Balkos's first poetry book, Come To Tower, is the poetry collection of a fresh voice of a renegade woman, angry, hopeful, strong, confused, clear and vulnerable. The poems are accompanied by Ash Gray’s beautiful tones of Hummingbird Gibson acoustic guitar, dazzlingly honest, unpretentious and real journey of a soul. Her voice is elegant, unique and or

Canine Teeth, A Stand Up Monolgoue

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The review Hub - Jacob Bush  " In   Canine Teeth, writer and performer Ayse Balkos shares her stories, most true and some slightly dramatised, of growing up as a Turkish woman. The show explores gender expectations in Turkish culture through its examination of the experiences of Balkos, her mother and her grandmother as single women. Ayse Balkos is clearly an excellent writer. She intersperses different parts of different stories well, and includes a moment of spoken word poetry. She has moments where she is fully engaging, especially in moments where she brings to life vivid characters other than herself. There are moments where one can see this piece has the potential to be something in the realm of Fleabag , using humour, emotion and caricatures to create a show that has something clear to say about the struggles of today’s society." The show details a young Turkish woman's awakening to her female power after a devastating day. It is about exploring the woman's ro

Hailing From Turkey

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  IN A PERPETUAL QUEST TO PIN DOWN HER IDENTITY, THE VISUAL ARTIST AYSE BALKÖSE DEMONSTRATES THAT THE COMPLEX AND DYNAMIC NATURE OF SELF IS AN ABUNDANT SOURCE OF INSPIRATION. “ My intention is capturing the physical sound waves and emotional impact of music and transforming it into the form of three-dimensional patterns. ” Hailing from Turkey, Ayse is based in Sheffield and started painting as a way of addressing questions surrounding her identity. As such, playing around with the definitions of identity is one of the key elements of her artistic practice.   As a self-taught multidisciplinary artist, Ayse’s work is an ever-changing attempt to understand herself in the context of the society we live in today. Her artistic repertoire consists of oil painting, live art performances (dance painting), photography, audio projects and visual installations. Ayse’s strength lies very much in her versatility. She has been part of numerous successful collaborations, including  A   Journey of UnBe

After the Royal Arts Prize Exhibition, A Thank You Letter To My Supporters

Hello, What an amazing journey…  Thank you for making it happen.  I am hoping you’ve all received a thank you letter form me. If not, I’d blame the Royal Mail and will send you another one. I’d like to thank every each of you for your belief in me, for your friendship and trust. It has given me a different type of responsibility and a sense of belonging. I would also like to thank the Royal Arts Prize for their generous reduction of the application fee and Eaton Trust for their generous funding towards the print costs of 2 of my photographs. I wouldn’t have made it without any of you. It was like a puzzle coming together with one piece at a time. Two of my photos printed on gold-washed aluminium, 2 of the large mixed media paintings went sent with frames made by me from pieces of woods found in skips. I paid just over half of the exhibition fee (Thanks to Royal Arts Prize) and booked myself a bus ticket for the opening day. I arrived in London in the late afternoon, just en

MENTIONS

Nice to be mentioned at The Star Sheffield as an Inspiring Installation Artist Talking Gigs, Photographer:  https://www.talkinggigs.co.uk/ngawang-lodup Tom Attah: Incredible photos from a very talented artists:  http://www.tah-uk.com/honey-bee-blues-club-sheffield/ The Confluence Project:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1mt1RCuhNM Link:

Material Stories

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Material Stories of Migration  is a collaborative arts project based in Sheffield in which migrants work creatively with local artists and researchers. We use a flexible ‘artslab’ format to spark explorations of the lived experiences of migrants from a wide range of backgrounds, opening up conversations and sharing stories of home, family, journeying and arrival.   We begin with broad themes, for example ‘map’, ‘journey’, ‘home’, ‘story’ and ‘memory’, and responses to these emerge collaboratively, often unexpected ways.Our aim is to combine the varied skills and enthusiasms of participants with the expertise.   A series of multimedia workshops that used poetry, painting, music and film to explore journeys to Sheffield and the relationships that asylum seekers and refugees have woven with the city. Participants and undergraduate students worked collaboratively with artists from Arts on the Run, a network that promotes cultural diversity in the arts. The workshops deve

Efflux- Audio-Video Installation

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Efflux is an audio-video installation which reflects Sheffielder's relation with the city's buildings. The sound is recorded with home-made binaural micro-recorder and overlapped to create the overlapping of time and spaces. It is the silence and space which drops the tension and gives the sense of union with the buildings that has occupied and used for different purposes than original intentions. This is where Sheffield inherits its creativity, from the flow, the efflux...