The moment you step through the threshold of Pilot Gallery, you are enveloped by an infinity that doesn’t even require you to lift your head. Serra Tansel’s exhibition titled “Skies,” which opened its doors on December 18, 2025 and continues until January 17, 2026, removes the sky from being merely a romantic object of contemplation and transforms it into a vast field of testimony inscribed with personal griefs, collective traumas, and political violence. In this narrative, where the artist positions the sky not as a shelter but as a touching, shaking, and even smelling entity, the viewer is invited to that uncanny horizon line where the ground ends and the body and history begin.
At the heart of the exhibition echoes the line by poet Mahmoud Darwish: “After the last sky, where should the birds fly?” This verse gains a shattering visual presence through a site-specific installation. Inspired by a cardboard bird seen at a Palestine solidarity march in London, the work collides the symbol of movement and freedom with the most ordinary material of global trade: cardboard boxes. The profound contradiction between the fluidity of logistics networks and bodies deprived of the right to move takes material form in the lightness of those cardboard wings. When this political weight merges with Tansel’s fresh gaze directed toward the sky during the first months of her motherhood, it finds poetic intimacy in an alabaster sculpture cast from her baby’s footprints and painted in sky colors. The mythical celestial dome we once thought unreachable becomes something tangible and material in the small footprints of an infant.
Yet this sky is not always clear; it also carries the invisible but indelible traces of political violence. The photographic series “Under the Same Sky” preserves only the sky portions of frames taken by Gazan journalists who were torn from life, making visible the heavy emptiness created by censorship and erasure. These “cropped” skies, lined up side by side, form the silent topography of a lost world, while in another corner of the exhibition a metal assemblage rises—pressed and transformed from police barriers. Standing before a wall painted in “barrier blue” tones, this sculpture emerges as a silent gesture of resistance that investigates how a blocking structure can be dismantled and turned into a new horizon line, an opening.
Tansel’s layered language that appeals to the senses connects the gallery space to the memory of Palestine’s lost orange groves through the scent released by an incense burner cast from orange peel. This intimate fragrance, combined with the weight of a limestone pedestal, takes the viewer on a simultaneous inner journey of displacement. On the other hand, the “Donkey Flights Project,” which addresses the Israeli army’s transportation of Gazan donkeys to Europe under the pretext of “rescue,” turns these absurd representational forms amid destruction into a devastating satire with donkey portraits hung on origami airplanes. The tension felt throughout the exhibition reaches its peak with a replica of a beach poster found in the open-visitation room of a prison in Puerto Rico: the promise of controlled freedom and the inaccessibility of an exotic landscape meet on the same canvas.
“Skies” reminds us once again, through different materials and sensory experiences, that everything living under the sky is bound to each other by invisible yet unbreakable ties. Serra Tansel turns the sky from something merely looked at into something used like a memory card that simultaneously records violence and hope. This exhibition, continuing until January 17 at Pilot Gallery’s space in Sıraselviler, invites us to a silent yet shattering witness by bringing together both the cry of a distant geography and the first steps of a new life under the same sky.
Apartment No:26 Note: Serra Tansel’s sky is not the boundless emptiness we know; on the contrary, it is an archive crammed full with each of our stories. If, on one of Beyoğlu’s gray winter days, you wish to discover how the sky can be both a barrier and an incense burner at the same time, this exhibition might open new horizons in your soul.
