Publication Launch & Conversation İz Öztat & Çağla Özbek: with zines presented by CUTT PRESS
Zilberman is pleased to announce, together with CUTT PRESS, the zine launch and conversation with İz Öztat and Çağla Özbek, on the occasion of İz Öztat’s solo exhibition Done with evil-doing at Zilberman | Berlin.
İz Öztat and Çağla Özbek will be in conversation about their joint research into the enduring complexity of the Faustian myth, which resulted in three distinct zines: the collection includes Here and now, and after? by İz Öztat, a script for a puppet play for camera currently on view at Zilberman; Çağla Özbek’s Counterdictions, a satirical closet drama accompanied by archival assemblages; and a long-form interview titled On Faustian bargains, implicatedness, freedom and collaborative research, which can now be accessed through CUTT PRESS and Zilberman | Berlin.
On the occasion of the conversation, Çağla Özbek’s archival assemblages, which accompany the text in the publication as pictorial exercises rooted in and expanding the written page will be presented alongside chosen research materials.
Sprawling across time and space, Counterdictions re-reads the storied dynamic between two sides of the famous bargain, the Master and the Devil, interpreting it through the coiled relationship between a cultural worker and the work of art. With an interminable number of stage characters, Counterdictions dramatizes the perpetual state of negotiation on the divergent labors of seeing versus exhibiting set inside a cemetery, a museum and the celestial plane.
In Here and now, and after?, İz turns to Kasperle and Karagöz traditions—viewing them as both tools of political satire and pedagogical instruction—to explore artistic agency, accountability, and the self’s relation to the Other, drawing on the Faustian pact as a literary motif. As agreements are reached by some puppets, others defy authority, demanding justice on their own terms.
On Faustian bargains..., is an extended dialogue detailing the discrete and complementary aspects of the authors’ 2.5‑year collaborative research from the many adaptations and translations to the continuing migrations of this foundational myth, and how their joint research informed their respective processes.
The collection of zines is produced as part of Es – a zine series initiated by artist İz Öztat in 2024 with the support of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant, designed by Katharina Hetzeneder and published by CUTT PRESS.
CUTT PRESS is a Berlin-based publishing project by Erin Warner Honeycutt that publishes poetry, pamphlets, bootlegs, artist books, and reprints.
Çağla Özbek is a writer, researcher and curator. Özbek received her BA in Western Languages and Literatures from Boğaziçi University, and holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the New School, New York, and an MA degree in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Dividing her concentration between publications, exhibitions and research projects materialising in the many intersections of visual arts and the written word, she regularly makes, edits and writes for publications on art, literature and feminism. Her previous publications as an author include Yukio Mishima, Eikoh Hosoe and Ordeal by Roses (2020), the artist’s book Semada (2021) and Voice, Vitrine, Tar: Unreliable Narrators from Archive to Memoir, Fiction to the Visual Arts (2024).
İz Öztat (born 1981 in Istanbul, lives and works in Berlin) studied Fine Arts and Visual Communication Design (MA) at Sabancı University, Istanbul, and Studio Art (BA, with honors) at Oberlin College, Ohio. She was a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Programme (2024–25). Her institutional exhibitions include Near East, Far West, 6th Kyiv Biennial, MSN, Warsaw (2025); these walls are not here to defend us, OFF-Biennale Budapest (2025); Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2023), where her work is also part of the collection; The Colony, Schwules Museum, Berlin (2018); Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); Land without Land, Heidelberger Kunstverein (2016); and the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). Öztat has been an artist-in-residence at the Swiss Institute Saha Residency (2025), the Istanbul–Berlin Residency Program (2022), and SAHA Studio, Istanbul (2021). She has worked at the intersection of art and education in self-organized, institutional, and academic settings. Her academic articles, essays, and fictional texts have been published in various media.
