Ferda Art Platform hosts Güneş Terkol’s solo exhibition Working Portraits. This series, initiated by the artist nearly a decade ago, brings visibility to the unsung heroes of everyday life—those who work, create, and sustain the city—through stitches on muslin fabric.
In Terkol’s practice, textile is both a material and a metaphor. The delicate, permeable nature of muslin embodies the fragility and resilience of daily life while becoming a symbol of labor, patience, and quiet productivity. The artist maps the city’s labor relationships through a series of portraits, depicting figures from fabric sellers to dentists, grocers to record store owners, barbers to carpenters’ workshops.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this series is how the material’s origin becomes part of the exhibition. The fabric seller from whom the muslin was sourced is himself one of the portrayed figures, intertwining the art-making process with the realm of everyday labor. Terkol connects viewers not only with the depicted figures but also with the invisible work embedded in their production cycle.
As curator Elif Sena İnci notes, the exhibition evokes Henri Lefebvre’s view of everyday life as the “center of social reproduction” and Michel de Certeau’s concept of the ordinary person’s “tactical creativity.” Terkol’s portraits can be read as a visual counterpart to this theoretical framework: ordinary spaces and small businesses form the essential fabric that sustains the city’s continuity.
Each portrait carries not just a face but the sounds, tools, objects, and rhythms of work surrounding it. The invisible layers of daily life are reshaped on the translucent surface of muslin. This transparency is both an artistic and societal gesture: Terkol lifts the veil covering labor.
The artist’s practice should be seen not only as “textile art” but also as a form of collective memory-making. Similar to her Gori Leso Leso (“everyday working life”) project with women in Indonesia’s Flores Island, Terkol centers storytelling and collaborative creation. The stories of women, workers, small shopkeepers, and artisans converge on the muslin; each stitch becomes a testimony woven into the city’s memory.
Working Portraits invites viewers from grand narratives to the everyday, from the visible to the invisible. On the muslin’s surface, the city breathes—through small shops, counters, the rhythm of hands, and the quiet poetry of work.
📍 Ferda Art Platform, Istanbul
📅 On view through October 11, 2025
This exhibition blurs the invisible line between the realm of art production and the labor of daily life, reminding us:
The city endures through the stories of hands.
