Face-to-Face with What Official History Excludes: Fatoş İrwen and “Rû Bi Rû” at Zilberman Istanbul

Diyarbakır-born artist Fatoş İrwen continued creating amidst extreme scarcity during her political imprisonment at Diyarbakır Prison between 2017 and 2020. The artistic vocabulary she forged using whatever everyday materials were within reach—paper, tea, and human hair—is no mere biographical footnote; it sits at the very heart of her artistic ethos and way of being.

On view at Zilberman Istanbul’s Mısır Apartment venue from September 15 to November 21, 2026, “Rû Bi Rû” (Kurdish for “face-to-face”) invites a direct confrontation with narratives sidelined, obscured, and silenced by official history. Materialized through dried thorns, desiccated riverbeds, and botanical traces, soil and water become shared metaphors for both sustained violence and the quiet resistance sprouting against it.

Having focused on the concept of kıyam (uprising/resurrection) in her 2023 exhibition Sûr in Berlin, İrwen now centers the image of mahşer (the day of gathering)—a collective state of togetherness stripped of hierarchy. Pushing the boundaries of her medium, the work calls upon the viewer to confront a memory marked for erasure and to bear that witness together.