Zeynep Didem Bardakcı / Founder

Zeynep Didem Bardakcı has a career shaped by a strong academic foundation and hands-on professional practice. She began her education in Turkey at Istanbul Technical University, Department of Architecture, and later expanded this foundation in Italy, deepening it through an international perspective. Her education in Florence established the basis of an approach that does not treat architecture solely as a technical discipline, but instead evaluates the relationship between space, art, and cultural context in a holistic manner. She further supported her academic development with studies in art history, gaining the ability to read and interpret the historical, cultural and aesthetic layers of space in depth.

In addition, she completed various courses and certification programs in design and spatial thinking at different institutions and universities, including Stanford University in the United States. Short- and long-term educational experiences across Europe and Asia carried her academic background into an interdisciplinary framework.

Following her academic education, she began her professional practice by founding Axis & Line, a firm operating in façade design and production. Through this firm, she carried out façade and display window projects, delivering applications for hotel developments and prestige brands. Her projects abroad—particularly in the Middle East—significantly deepened her on-site and implementation experience. Over time, this façade-focused structure evolved under Bardakcı’s direction into a more boutique and conceptual practice, becoming a specialized entity producing window and show window designs for leading brands in Turkey and internationally.

Bardakcı approached these display windows not merely as product presentation tools, but as spatial compositions in which space, object, and narrative are constructed together. This approach revealed the challenges of sourcing site-specific elements, objects, sculptures,and graphic works used in such designs, making the establishment of a workshop where these productions could be directly realized an inevitable step.

In this direction, Bardakcı founded a studio where she began producing sculptures and site-specific artworks, later transforming this production practice into a gallery structure. Art & More Gallery emerged as the natural continuation of this process, becoming a platform where both collection-based art productions and artworks developed specifically for architectural projects are produced and exhibited. The structure was renamed Zeynep Didem Bardakcı Studio to emphasize clearly that it contains only her own works and designs. The Studio continues its sculpture, object, design, and project-specific production activities in Akaretler, Istanbul.

All of this academic background, design practice, artistic production and on-site experience has enabled Zeynep Didem Bardakcı to build a layered and steadily developed professional accumulation. It is through this multidisciplinary analytical foundation—capable of evaluating different disciplines on the same ground—that she established In Between.