Arter presents “Velvet Gaze”, Nilbar Güreş’s first institutional solo exhibition in Türkiye, offering a comprehensive overview of an artistic practice that spans painting, printmaking, collage, photography, sculpture and video. Curated by Emre Baykal, the exhibition centres on Güreş’s approach, which constantly displaces boundaries between human and non-human beings, fiction and reality, representation and abstraction.
Focus of the exhibition
“Velvet Gaze” brings together early works with new productions, making visible the intellectual layers of a practice that now spans more than twenty-five years. The artist merges storytelling with critical and dissident discourses while reconfiguring people, animals, plants and mythological elements within an interwoven network of relations.
In these works, the following themes stand out prominently:
– new vocabularies that erode gender norms,
– intuitive openings toward alternative forms of living together,
– hybrid forms, resistance, permeability and fragility.
Practice and method
Güreş’s production moves freely between different media; sometimes she sometimes reworks a single idea across various techniques, and at other times combines multiple techniques within the same work. This diversity reinforces the polyphony, hybridity and questions of coexistence that are inherent to the subjects she explores.
What the exhibition offers
“Velvet Gaze” opens a generous space that invites viewers to trace the transitions between Güreş’s visual language and her intellectual universe. Through the artist’s colourful, sharp and occasionally humorous approach, the exhibition unsettles established patterns and calls on the audience to forge new contexts and to reconsider a world woven with contradictions through fresh eyes.
📍 Arter – Gallery 2, Dolapdere
🗓️ On view until 12 April 2026
