Nilbar Güreş: LOVERS / Atrium: unspeakable home, enchanting companions

Nilbar Güreş: Lovers
The exhibition Lovers by Nilbar Güreş (*1977 in Istanbul) is the largest presentation in Germany to date. Güreş consistently interrogates conventional gender roles and relationships, as well as alluding to opportunities for empowering feminine and queer identities. Her artistic praxis is based on subtle moments of resistance, quietly radical in their enactment along the margins of everyday life.

Güreş works in diverse formats, including painting, photography, film, performance, collage, and drawing. Her work establishes a panorama consisting in large part of women, displaying solidarity and who inscribe their lived worlds into the existing systems. In the large-format photo series "TrabZONE" (2010) and "Çırçır" (2010), women from various generations populate real locations from the artist’s family history, territory traditionally defined by patriarchy. Textiles and fabric form an essential medium for the artist and a productive resource of subversive appropriation. In the new works Shut Hammock (2019) and Blank Space (2019), created by Nilbar Güreş especially for this exhibition, fabric plays a central role, and is transferred from the traditional repertoire of craftsmanship into the (trans)genderpolitical narratives of the sculptures. The fabrics that are incorporated into the collage La Paz (2016) symbolize the specific landscape and culture of the Aymara, an indigenous and matriarchally structured society in Bolivia.

The work of Güreş is performative to the highest degree, as implemented in her photographic and sculptural works, but in an especially evocative way in her collages and drawings. Here an anarchic mixture of various stage-style arrangements establishes a precise and compelling vocabulary. This close connection of material aesthetics and performance is revealed in a singular way in the early collage Self-Defloration (2006)—a key work in this exhibition.

Curated by Anja Casser

Special thanks to Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna, and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin.

unspeakable home, enchanting companions
with Nur Koçak, Nil Yalter & Melis Tezkan, Istanbul Queer Art Collective, Gökçe Yiğitel, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu (in collaboration with Şevval Kılıç and Derin Cankaya), Deniz Gül, Gülkan Noir, Gözde İlkin, Kanka Productions, Tümay Göktepe, Voltrans Initiative, Aylime Aslı Demir and Ugemfo

unspeakable home, enchanting companions is dwelling on existing and imagined intersections of artistic practice and contemporary feminist intensities in Turkey. Relying on a satirical critique of certain binaries, normative citizenship, linguistically fabricated supremacy, and neoliberal power politics, it probes for alternative diegeses, textualities, and performings, which enliven the relations of art and activism. Film screenings, performances and an archival addition including zines, documentation of organized festivals, workshops, happenings, and demonstrations pursuing the hybrid productions of queer feminist activism in Turkey will be accompanying the exhibition.

Public program

April 12, 2019
5:30pm: Exhibition tour
With Derya Bayraktaroğlu, Gökçe Yiğitel, Gülkan Noir and Tümay Göktepe

7pm: Performance
a trial on S.C.U.M. by Gökçe Yiğitel

April 13, 2019
6:30pm: Performance
Gülkan Noir sounding Through the Black, An Intro for Transitioning

7pm: Film screening
Asiye Nasıl Kurtulur (How to Save Asiye), 1986, TR (101 min., Turkish w. ENG subtitles)

May 15, 2019
6pm: Film screening
#resistayol, 2016, DE/TR (56 min., Turkish w. GER/ENG subtitles)

7pm: Film Screening
Voltrans, documentary, 2014, TR (60 min., Turkish w. GER subtitles)

June 12, 2019
6pm: Film Screening
Asiye Nasıl Kurtulur (How to save Asiye), 1986, TR (101 min., Turkish w. ENG subtitles)

June 14, 2019 
5:30pm: Artist talk
With Rüzgâr Buşki and P. Ulaş Dutlu from the collective Kanka Productions

7pm: Film screening
#resistayol, 2016, DE/TR (56 min., Turkish w. GER/ENG subtitles)

8pm: Film screening
Voltrans, documentary, 2014, TR (60 min., Turkish w. GER subtitles)

June 19, 2019
6pm: Exhibition tour
With Anja Casser & Derya Bayraktaroğlu

7pm: Lecture performance
Aylime Aslı Demir “At least three fingers;“ still life lessons from a queer feminist activist

Curated by Derya Bayraktaroğlu

More information on www.badischer-kunstverein.de