Salt Artistic Research and Production Grant Program
2025-2026 Projects
In collaboration with the BBVA Foundation
Salt Artistic Research and Production Grant Program recipients: Güneş Terkol (left) and Onur Gökmen (right)
Salt, in collaboration with the BBVA Foundation, is pleased to announce the Salt Artistic Research and Production Grant Program recipients.
This year’s selection committee included Amanda de la Garza (Artistic Deputy Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), Gilermo Zuaznabar (Chief Curator, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao), Marina Otero Verzier (Architect-Researcher), Özge Ersoy (Senior Curator, Asia Art Archive), Laura Poderoso (Deputy Director, BBVA Foundation), and Deniz Ova (Executive Director, Salt).
After evaluating 210 applications, the committee awarded the Artistic Research Grant to Güneş Terkol for Layers of a Migration Story, and the Production Grant to Onur Gökmen for Subsoil.
A multidisciplinary project by Güneş Terkol in collaboration with her mother Elmira Terkol, Layers of a Migration Story traces a multi-stage migration from Russia to China, and eventually to Türkiye. Developed over two decades through interviews, archives, and collected objects, the research explores collective remembrance, resilience, and adaptation across shifting geographies. Reimagined through everyday practices and carriers of memory, the project centers on migration chests and their symbolic contents, bringing together oral testimonies, family narratives, and cultural materials to uncover layered histories embedded in personal and communal experience.
Subsoil revisits a largely overlooked episode in the environmental and institutional history of Türkiye: the detection of radioactive contamination in Black Sea tea following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Drawing on research at Middle East Technical University, the project investigates how scientific findings are shaped, silenced, or dismissed within state institutions. Drawing on archival materials and narrative reconstruction, it traces the movement of radiation through natural and institutional systems, highlighting how environmental harm—though invisible and slow—can alter public health, policy, and collective memory.
Each artist will receive a grant of 20,000 Euros to support their projects (all grants are subject to withholdings and other taxes stipulated by current legislation). The resulting works will be presented at Salt in 2026.
About the Artists
Güneş Terkol graduated from the Painting Department at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and received her master’s degree in Art and Design from Yıldız Technical University. Employing fabric, sewing, sound, and drawing, Terkol deals with issues around gender in her practice. Believing in the importance of collective work and shared purpose, the artist has produced collaborative works in workshops held across various countries, drawing inspiration from everyday realities and imaginaries. Since 2005, she has created works both individually and as part of the artist collective Ha Za Vu Zu. Since 2017, she has also been part of the women’s artist collective Alaca Heyheyler and continues to perform with her music group GuGuOu.
Onur Gökmen currently resides in Berlin. His work spans sculpture, photography, video, installation, and painting, addressing reality as something perpetually informed by the entwinement of past and future. He draws on collective histories, past events, and myths to map an archaeology of the self, uncovering the foundations that inform our sense of historical hierarchy. His work has been presented at various institutions and events, including the Sharjah Biennial; Salt (Istanbul); Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid); KuLe (Berlin); James Fuentes (New York); Asia Culture Center (Gwangju); and Delfina Foundation (London).
About the Selection Committee
Amanda de la Garza is a curator and art historian. In 2024, she was appointed Artistic Deputy Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Previously, she served as Head of Visual Arts at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Director of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, where she also worked as Adjunct Curator from 2012 to 2019. She holds a BA in Sociology and an MA in Social Anthropology and Curatorial Studies. She has developed curatorial projects in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Spain, and the USA, and has been awarded the Emerging Curators Prize by the Biennial of the Frontiers, as well as several research grants in Mexico and abroad.
Gilermo Zuaznabar is Chief Curator at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, where he served as Curator of Design and Architecture during the 2023-2024 season. He earned his PhD from the Barcelona School of Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in 2003, after completing postgraduate studies at the Painting-Architecture Workshop led by Prof. Gerhard Merz at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1996. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Universitat de Barcelona in 1994. Zuaznabar is the Spanish representative for the Dieter Rams Foundation in Frankfurt and serves on the board of trustees of the Design History Foundation in Barcelona. His academic career includes roles as Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (2006-2023), Visiting Professor at Elisava School of Design (2003-2010), and faculty member at the Barcelona School of Architecture, UPC (1998-2005).
Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher. She leads the “Data Mourning” clinic at Columbia GSAPP, an initiative exploring the intersection between digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe. In 2022, she received Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. She has collaborated with the DIPC Supercomputing Center to develop alternative models for storing data and was invited to contribute to Chile’s first National Data Centers Plan, together with Resistencia SocioAmbiental and other local communities on the front lines of extractivism. Otero is the co-editor of Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), A Matter of Data (2021), and More-than-Human (2020). She was Head of the MA Social Design program at Design Academy Eindhoven from 2020 to 2023 and Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut from 2015 to 2022. She has curated exhibitions such as Wet Dreams at CentroCentro and the Mayrit Biennial in Madrid (2024), Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains at Galería Municipal do Porto (2023), Work, Body, Leisure at the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), and After Belonging at the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016). Since 2023, she has been a member of the Architecture Advisory Committee of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Özge Ersoy is Senior Curator at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. Her research interests include expanded ideas of archiving, collecting, and exhibition-making in contemporary art. Recent projects include co-curating In Our Own Backyard (2025), Countering Time (2024), and Translations, Expansions (2022). Her writings have appeared in various publications, including How to Pin Down Smoke: ruangrupa since 2000 (Afterall Books, 2025, forthcoming), Curating Under Pressure (Routledge, 2020) and The Constituent Museum (Valiz and L’Internationale, 2018).
Laura Poderoso is Deputy Director of the BBVA Foundation. She holds a degree in Law and a master’s in Legal Practice from Universidad de Deusto. She joined BBVA in 2008 as part of the Corporate & Investment Banking Operations division. In 2011, she moved to the BBVA Foundation, where she is responsible for legal-financial functions, compliance, and general administration. Alongside these roles, she brings extensive experience in project management, public event organization, and institutional relations.
Deniz Ova is the Executive Director of Salt. Between 2013 and 2022, she was the Director of the Istanbul Design Biennial at the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV). She previously served as Project Leader (2007-2010) and Director (2010-2013) of the International Projects department at İKSV, where she developed and organized festivals and events in various European cities. She also coordinated the Türkiye Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the artist residency studio “Turquie” at Cité Internationale des Arts, and the participation of Türkiye in the London Design Biennial in 2016. From 2014 to 2022, she was an advisor to the Türkiye Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Ova completed her studies in Political Science and Linguistics at Universität Stuttgart. She is a fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar and Stiftung Mercator’s “Turkey Europe Future Forum” and teaches Art and Design Culture at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.
The BBVA Foundation, as the corporate social responsibility of the BBVA Group, is committed to advancing society by promoting and disseminating knowledge through research-based, artistic, cultural, and scientific projects.
This year’s selection committee included Amanda de la Garza (Artistic Deputy Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), Gilermo Zuaznabar (Chief Curator, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao), Marina Otero Verzier (Architect-Researcher), Özge Ersoy (Senior Curator, Asia Art Archive), Laura Poderoso (Deputy Director, BBVA Foundation), and Deniz Ova (Executive Director, Salt).
After evaluating 210 applications, the committee awarded the Artistic Research Grant to Güneş Terkol for Layers of a Migration Story, and the Production Grant to Onur Gökmen for Subsoil.
A multidisciplinary project by Güneş Terkol in collaboration with her mother Elmira Terkol, Layers of a Migration Story traces a multi-stage migration from Russia to China, and eventually to Türkiye. Developed over two decades through interviews, archives, and collected objects, the research explores collective remembrance, resilience, and adaptation across shifting geographies. Reimagined through everyday practices and carriers of memory, the project centers on migration chests and their symbolic contents, bringing together oral testimonies, family narratives, and cultural materials to uncover layered histories embedded in personal and communal experience.
Subsoil revisits a largely overlooked episode in the environmental and institutional history of Türkiye: the detection of radioactive contamination in Black Sea tea following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Drawing on research at Middle East Technical University, the project investigates how scientific findings are shaped, silenced, or dismissed within state institutions. Drawing on archival materials and narrative reconstruction, it traces the movement of radiation through natural and institutional systems, highlighting how environmental harm—though invisible and slow—can alter public health, policy, and collective memory.
Each artist will receive a grant of 20,000 Euros to support their projects (all grants are subject to withholdings and other taxes stipulated by current legislation). The resulting works will be presented at Salt in 2026.
About the Artists
Güneş Terkol graduated from the Painting Department at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and received her master’s degree in Art and Design from Yıldız Technical University. Employing fabric, sewing, sound, and drawing, Terkol deals with issues around gender in her practice. Believing in the importance of collective work and shared purpose, the artist has produced collaborative works in workshops held across various countries, drawing inspiration from everyday realities and imaginaries. Since 2005, she has created works both individually and as part of the artist collective Ha Za Vu Zu. Since 2017, she has also been part of the women’s artist collective Alaca Heyheyler and continues to perform with her music group GuGuOu.
Onur Gökmen currently resides in Berlin. His work spans sculpture, photography, video, installation, and painting, addressing reality as something perpetually informed by the entwinement of past and future. He draws on collective histories, past events, and myths to map an archaeology of the self, uncovering the foundations that inform our sense of historical hierarchy. His work has been presented at various institutions and events, including the Sharjah Biennial; Salt (Istanbul); Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid); KuLe (Berlin); James Fuentes (New York); Asia Culture Center (Gwangju); and Delfina Foundation (London).
About the Selection Committee
Amanda de la Garza is a curator and art historian. In 2024, she was appointed Artistic Deputy Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Previously, she served as Head of Visual Arts at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Director of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, where she also worked as Adjunct Curator from 2012 to 2019. She holds a BA in Sociology and an MA in Social Anthropology and Curatorial Studies. She has developed curatorial projects in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Spain, and the USA, and has been awarded the Emerging Curators Prize by the Biennial of the Frontiers, as well as several research grants in Mexico and abroad.
Gilermo Zuaznabar is Chief Curator at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, where he served as Curator of Design and Architecture during the 2023-2024 season. He earned his PhD from the Barcelona School of Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in 2003, after completing postgraduate studies at the Painting-Architecture Workshop led by Prof. Gerhard Merz at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1996. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Universitat de Barcelona in 1994. Zuaznabar is the Spanish representative for the Dieter Rams Foundation in Frankfurt and serves on the board of trustees of the Design History Foundation in Barcelona. His academic career includes roles as Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (2006-2023), Visiting Professor at Elisava School of Design (2003-2010), and faculty member at the Barcelona School of Architecture, UPC (1998-2005).
Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher. She leads the “Data Mourning” clinic at Columbia GSAPP, an initiative exploring the intersection between digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe. In 2022, she received Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. She has collaborated with the DIPC Supercomputing Center to develop alternative models for storing data and was invited to contribute to Chile’s first National Data Centers Plan, together with Resistencia SocioAmbiental and other local communities on the front lines of extractivism. Otero is the co-editor of Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), A Matter of Data (2021), and More-than-Human (2020). She was Head of the MA Social Design program at Design Academy Eindhoven from 2020 to 2023 and Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut from 2015 to 2022. She has curated exhibitions such as Wet Dreams at CentroCentro and the Mayrit Biennial in Madrid (2024), Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains at Galería Municipal do Porto (2023), Work, Body, Leisure at the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), and After Belonging at the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016). Since 2023, she has been a member of the Architecture Advisory Committee of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Özge Ersoy is Senior Curator at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. Her research interests include expanded ideas of archiving, collecting, and exhibition-making in contemporary art. Recent projects include co-curating In Our Own Backyard (2025), Countering Time (2024), and Translations, Expansions (2022). Her writings have appeared in various publications, including How to Pin Down Smoke: ruangrupa since 2000 (Afterall Books, 2025, forthcoming), Curating Under Pressure (Routledge, 2020) and The Constituent Museum (Valiz and L’Internationale, 2018).
Laura Poderoso is Deputy Director of the BBVA Foundation. She holds a degree in Law and a master’s in Legal Practice from Universidad de Deusto. She joined BBVA in 2008 as part of the Corporate & Investment Banking Operations division. In 2011, she moved to the BBVA Foundation, where she is responsible for legal-financial functions, compliance, and general administration. Alongside these roles, she brings extensive experience in project management, public event organization, and institutional relations.
Deniz Ova is the Executive Director of Salt. Between 2013 and 2022, she was the Director of the Istanbul Design Biennial at the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV). She previously served as Project Leader (2007-2010) and Director (2010-2013) of the International Projects department at İKSV, where she developed and organized festivals and events in various European cities. She also coordinated the Türkiye Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the artist residency studio “Turquie” at Cité Internationale des Arts, and the participation of Türkiye in the London Design Biennial in 2016. From 2014 to 2022, she was an advisor to the Türkiye Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Ova completed her studies in Political Science and Linguistics at Universität Stuttgart. She is a fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar and Stiftung Mercator’s “Turkey Europe Future Forum” and teaches Art and Design Culture at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.
The BBVA Foundation, as the corporate social responsibility of the BBVA Group, is committed to advancing society by promoting and disseminating knowledge through research-based, artistic, cultural, and scientific projects.
In collaboration
