Cagla Ilk, Sean Tatol, Mohammad Salemy, “Freedom Overspill”, conversation
11 September 2025, 17:00
The New Centre for Research & Practice is hosting a conversation with Cagla Ilk, Director of the Gorky Theatre, and New York–based critic Sean Tatol, moderated by Mohammad Salemy. The West’s postwar consensus on the freedom of expression is no longer taken for granted and now feels threatened from all sides. Right-wing governments increasingly censor or instrumentalize art for their own ends, the market optimizes for its bottom line, and even the Left is incapable of defending art beyond its use as ideology or activism. The very meaning of expression itself has become obscure. What can be done to adapt to or change these conditions?
Free admission
Language: English
Duration: 60 mins.
Language: English
Duration: 60 mins.
Sean Tatol is an art critic based in New York City. He writes primarily on his website, The Manhattan Art Review. The Manhattan Art Review favors short-form reviews of art exhibitions with a five-star rating system, prioritizing strong and potentially divisive opinions in contradiction to the polite conventions of mainstream art writing. By this approach he aims to emphasize the importance of judgment in art criticism, in the hopes of fostering a functional arts discourse that welcomes disagreement, debate, and renewed attempts to grapple with the complexities of art.
Çağla Ilk is a curator and architect. Since 2020, she has been co-director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden with Misal Adnan Yıldız. She works transdisciplinarily in theory and practice between visual art, architecture, sound, theater and performance. She uses dramaturgy as a method of curating and integrates transdisciplinary approaches into her curatorial work. From 2012-2020, Ilk was a dramaturge and curator at the Maxim Gorky Theater and she was a curator of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Mohammad Salemy is an independent Berlin-based artist, critic and curator from Canada. Together with a changing cast, he forms the artist collective Alphabet Collection. Salemy is the Organizer at The New Centre for Research & Practice. He has been the cofounding Organizer of The New Centre since 2014 and the editor-in-chief of its publishing arm, Triple Ampersand. He is also the editor of "For Machine Use Only: Contemplations on Algorithmic Epistemology" (&&&, 2016) and "Model is the Message: Incredible Machines Conference 2022" (&&&, 2023).