Elgiz Museum once again invites viewers to wander the perceptual boundaries of art with a new selection from its collection. Mirage Season, true to its name, oscillates between what the eye sees and what the mind believes.
Reality as an Illusion
The exhibition brings together artists from different periods of contemporary art, united by a single theme: the unreliability of seeing. Alex Prager’s cinematic frames stage the frozen beauty of modern loneliness. Her figures, as if paused mid-scene on a film set, reveal the theatrical nature of everyday life. The abstract arrangements of Asım İşler and Bedri Baykam reflect the conflicted relationship between the individual and modern society with formal energy. Concepts of time, space, and identity in these works are not fixed—they are fluid, slippery, and sometimes blurred.
Layers of Time
Ferhat Özgür’s Jump Series transforms the notions of repetition and continuity into a performance. A repeated movement becomes cultural memory, with the artist making both individual experience and collective history visible. In the abstract compositions of Filiz Azak and Güngör Taner, there is an intuitive balance between nature, color, and form. Their paintings feel less like landscapes and more like the sensory echoes of landscapes—recalling the ancient yet fragile relationship between humanity and nature.
The Memory of Material
Habip Aydoğdu and Azade Köker build a contemporary language with traditional materials, inviting viewers to a bridge between past and present. Here, time is not just something that flows; it is tangible, layered, and resilient. Melis Buyruk’s installation Golden Reflections nearly erases the line between nature and art, while Jennifer Steinkamp’s digital video work Rapunzel dissolves it entirely: pixels, light, and motion converge to draw viewers into the virtual mist of a fairy tale.
Within the Mirage
Mirage Season is more than a selection; it is a question posed to the nature of art itself: Where does reality begin—and when does it turn into illusion? This exhibition reminds us that even in the moment when visual perception fractures, art can still create meaning. Like a mirage in the desert, the near and far, the now and the past, the concrete and the abstract shimmer together.
📍 Elgiz Museum, Maslak
🗓️ On view until November 15, 2025
