Arter opens its new season on September 11 with Nilbar Güreş’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Turkey, Velvet Gaze, and the group exhibition I Need a Little More Time, featuring photo-based works by 21 artists.
Arter welcomes the culture and arts season with two new exhibitions opening on September 11. Velvet Gaze by Nilbar Güreş, curated by Emre Baykal and presented on Arter’s 2nd floor gallery, brings together a wide selection of the artist’s works across different media, ranging from early pieces to recent creations. Another exhibition opening on the same date, I Need a Little More Time, focuses on the photo-based productions of 21 artists from Turkey and various other regions. The group exhibition, curated by Oğuz Karakütük, can be visited on Arter’s 1st floor gallery.
Sour as a Lemon, 2020
Velvet Gaze
The Velvet Gaze exhibition brings together a broad selection of Nilbar Güreş’s works from her early to recent production. The exhibition presents a comprehensive panorama of Güreş’s practice across different media. Combining storytelling with critical discourse, it creates a colorful and multilayered world based on a constantly evolving network of relationships among humans, animals, plants, and mythological elements. Güreş employs various media such as painting, printmaking, collage, photography, sculpture, and video without distinction; sometimes she revisits an idea through multiple tools, and at other times she combines these media within a single artwork.
This diversity in materials, media, and production methods also reflects themes such as the coexistence of species, hybrid forms, and resistance to othering. Güreş’s works offer a new vocabulary that questions social gender norms and invites viewers to consider alternative ways of living together.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication providing a comprehensive look at Güreş’s practice over the past twenty-five years. The publication, designed by Didem Uraler Çelik, includes texts by Emre Baykal, Silvia Eiblmayr, and Lora Sarıaslan.
Rehearsing, 2023
I Need a Little More Time
Curated by Oğuz Karakütük, I Need a Little More Time focuses on photo-based production and brings together the works of 21 artists from Turkey and other regions. The exhibition highlights the possibilities and boundaries of photography, shedding light on the medium’s increasingly diverse forms of expression today.
Moving beyond the idea of photography as a medium that freezes a single “moment,” the exhibition presents works that unfold over extended periods, involve interventions, and emphasize a conceptual approach. The phrase “I need a little more time” is not only an individual request but also reflects the desire to expand and redefine the boundaries of photography itself. The works in the exhibition offer an intuitive, polyphonic, and fluid approach in opposition to rapid production practices, fixed forms of representation, and technical determinism. By making visible the gestures of the production process, the tools used, and surface transformations, the exhibition positions photography not merely as a representational tool but as a material and intellectual field of production.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with texts by curator Oğuz Karakütük, Caroline von Courten, and Ömer Şişman, designed by Nazlı Deniz Oğuz.
Ongoing Exhibitions
In addition to these two new exhibitions opening in September, Arter will also host Franz Erhard Walther’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Turkey, Attempt to Become a Sculpture, as well as the group exhibition On Water Under Pressure, featuring works in painting, sculpture, and photography by 15 artists, which can be visited in the autumn.
