Artist Statement

Arzu Arda Kosar’s interest in borders, territories and social psychology has led her to examine urban space, street art, collaborative art making and community building art practices. She is the founder of Yarn Bombing Los Angeles (YBLA), a group of guerrilla knitters who explore the boundary between high and low art while staging public installations and performances to help expand the definition of public art to include self-initiated, temporal urban interventions. She is also a member of the MapConception, a collaborative duo that explores issues related to urban history and psychogeography.

Kosar has earned recognition from the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, OC Weekly, Lummax Journal, Cumhuriyet, and Nokta. Kosar has also written articles on architecture and sociology for Doxa magazine. She is currently working on the collaborative public art installation CAFAM: Granny Squared for which Kosar and her YBLA collective is organizing an international network of 250+ crafters to create a crocheted cozy for the Craft and Folk Art Museum in an attempt to manipulate scale and perception and play with artistic, architectural and institutional identity. YBLA grew out of the knit graffiti event “Yarn Bombing 18th Street” which brought together a 64 knit graffiti artists from four continents that created individual site specific installations at the 18th Street Arts Center.

She also produced and co-curated the ‘Los Angeles Istanbul Connection’ at 18th Street Art Center, which exhibited Turkish artists and their LA-based peers working in similar subjects. Kosar also collaborated with students from Loyola Marymount University for ‘The Purpose of Being’ as part of the university’s Bellarmine Forum’s Women’s Art and Activism series. She is the co-founder of TransIstanbul Collective that worked with inner city youth in Istanbul Turkey and co-founder of International Survey of Alternative Artscene that examined contemporary art practices outside of the museum-gallery system in different parts of the world. She received her BA in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MFA in New Genres from the University of Southern California.

Kosar says: “My work has to do with different ways of charting borders, despite –or perhaps because of, their often temporal and elusive nature. Whether I am documenting literal lines drawn on the ground, dealing with territorialism, categorization or exploring mental maps, my interest lies in exploring the ways social networks operate and the inter and intra group relationships they generate.”