Team

Çağla Ilk is a curator and the Artistic Director of the Maxim Gorki Theater beginning with the 2026/27 season. Her work interweaves theater, performance, architecture, sound, and contemporary art within a transdisciplinary curatorial practice that deliberately expands institutional boundaries. She creates formats in which the logics of theatrical and exhibition practices inform one another and generate new forms of multilayered collective experience.

Born in Istanbul, Ilk studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. With her postmigrant platform Büro Milk, she developed performances in public space in cities including Berlin, Munich, and Istanbul. At the same time, she worked as a researcher on the project Building Culture in the Multi-Ethnic City at the University of Siegen.

From 2012 to 2020, Ilk worked as a dramaturge and curator at the Maxim Gorki Theater, where she initiated numerous interdisciplinary projects and festivals connecting theater with contemporary visual art in transcultural contexts. A defining aspect of this period was her work on the Berliner Herbstsalon, which evolved under her co-curation into a major platform for interdisciplinary artistic practices.

From 2020 to 2025, Ilk served as director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, initially together with Misal Adnan Yıldız. There, she further developed her curatorial approach at the intersection of exhibition-making, performance, and sound. For Ilk, sound is not merely an aesthetic element, but a social and political field of experience.

Her work gained international visibility through her role as curator of the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Under the title Thresholds, she brought together works by Michael Akstaller, Yael Bartana, Robert Lippok, Nicole L‘Huillier, Ersan Mondtag, and Jan St. Werner. Conceived as a threshold space, the pavilion explored the intersections of architecture, sound, and political contemporaneity.

With her return to the Maxim Gorki Theater, Çağla Ilk brings an internationally-informed perspective that understands theater as an open space of encounter between artistic disciplines and social realities.