Damla Tamer is a visual artist and educator born in 1986 in Istanbul, Turkey. She lives on the unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories (Vancouver, Canada) since 2009. Her practice involves a close engagement with craft, focusing on weaving and other textile techniques and combining them with experimental mark making, alongside spoken performances and collaborative social work. Her works explore the affective conditions of labour under late capitalism, and the evolution of forms of civil protest within the contemporary political history of Turkey. She is interested in how different modes of agency create particular kinds of causal structures, giving way to new organizations of space and time. This involves exploring actions of hospitality, solidarity, forgiveness and risk in relation to representation.

Damla Tamer’s work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at Darling Foundry (Montreal, 2013) and the Fifty Fifty Arts Collective (Victoria, 2018), included in The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom at the Contemporary Art Gallery curated by Kimberly Phillips (Vancouver, 2020), and featured on the cover of Capilano Review (3.42: Translingual). She has received grants and prizes for her art and writing from institutions such as the Canada Council for the Arts and the University of British Columbia, and participated in artist-in-residence programs internationally, the most recent one being a three month residency at Stundars Museum (Finland). Her upcoming projects include exhibitions at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery and Access Gallery.

Damla Tamer is a founding member of the artist collective A.M. (Art Mamas), which aims to create support networks for artist caregivers, while critically exploring the place of motherhood and care work within the dominant culture of art production. She has contributed to various grassroots and artist-run organizations, such as the Dynamo Arts Association in Vancouver, and collaborated with other artists in the production of works. She has co-founded and chaired the Inter-co-op Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Platform of False Creek, which aims to facilitate equitable access to co-operative housing and an expanded, anti-colonial notion of hospitality in the neighbourhood context. She continues to be interested in the potential of co-operative structures and the intersections of pedagogy, care, and art making.