Ahali Conversations is a podcast that investigates the future of cultural production, looking at spaces that allow new communities to emerge. Art, design, architecture, and the cultural institutions that host these fields are explored in search of further possibilities for making, talking, and gathering. “Ahali'” in Turkish refers to a community defined through contingency, without a defined or expressed commonality other than being together. The podcast searches for practitioners and institutions that help generate an ahali, meanwhile forming its own, through recorded conversations and live audience participation. For Ahali, podcast creator Can Altay meets with thinkers, writers, artists, curators, architects, and designers. These conversations map out the territory from which social and cultural change happens and bring together a community from around the world to discuss what the future holds for these fields and institutional frames they inhabit.

Can Altay is an artist and academic engaged in work on the politics of everyday life, public space, urban life, objects of use, and artistic action. Using narrative devices and spatial instruments, he has produced exhibition designs, installations, and settings for common use. Altay, who grapples with objects of use and encounters, has realized personal exhibitions in Bolzano, Italy; Istanbul; Utrecht, the Netherlands; London; Berlin; and Bristol, United Kingdom. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, MN; MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; MAXXI, Rome; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and SALT, Istanbul. Periodicals including Architectural Design (AD), Journal of Architectural Education, and Frieze have featured Altay’s writing and research. Altay is the founding editor of Ahali: A Journal for Setting a Setting. As associate professor at faculty of architecture at the Istanbul Bilgi University, Altay was the chair of the Department of Product Design (2012–19), and of Interior Architecture until 2020.