Kaya Genç

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  picks February 04, 2019

  Soufiane Ababri

  In Turkey’s oil wrestlers, Soufiane Ababri finds the focus for an exhibition tackling Western representations of the Orient. In the Moroccan-born artist’s “Bedwork Series,” all works 2018, oil-slathered Turkish men attempt to overthrow one another, less agents of domination than floral figures defying the homoeroticizing gaze. Pink-cheeked men with fluid gender identities, the pehlivans nourish and pour olive oil on each other as Ababri’s affectionate, colored pencil depictions turn masculinity on its head; the softhearted male bodies derive their power from acts of kindness, not the roughness

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  picks December 03, 2018

  Çağrı Saray

  Since the mid 2000s, Çağrı Saray has been obsessed with Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), the 1987 film by Wim Wenders. Damiel and Cassiel, the film's angel protagonists who watch and eavesdrop on the Wall-divided city from above, flutter around Saray's meditative exhibition. In the video installation Homage to Peter Handke, 2018, Saray reshoots the opening scene, his hand translating the first lines of Handke's script into Turkish. In That night , 2018, he plasters a set of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds posters on the gallery wall, reenacting a key moment in the film, when Damiel meets

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  picks October 12, 2018

  Fatma Bucak

  In 2015, Fatma Bucak collaborated with a cameraman on a visit to a ranch in Texas where dozens of bodies of Mexican migrants are found every summer, returning home with video footage and ideas for a sculpture. The result, the exhibition “A World of Ten Thousand Things,” offers a characteristically perceptive look at an urgent issue.

  A sentiment lurking at the edge of my conscious, 2018, is a sweeping seven-channel video installation that portrays Mexican migrants in two distinct landscapes along the Mexico-US border. One landscape features a river with reeds and a view of the horizon; the second,

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  picks September 30, 2018

  Sefer Memişoğlu

  In Sefer Memişoğlu’s “The Eye’s Ray,” mystical video installations, libidinous sculptures, and five unsettling drawings surrender symbols of masculinity to the female gaze. The Laugh of the Medusa, 2017, a sculpture made with silicone and human hair, involves a gorgon-like head covered not with snakes but with a dozen circumcised and uncircumcised penises. Her lethal stare seems to be directed at Glorious Moment, 2014, a video installed at the opposite end of the gallery, in which the phallic silhouette of a match is backdropped by waves beating against a shore at sunset.

  MacGuffin, 2018, evokes

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  picks August 29, 2018

  Lara Ögel

  There is much dust in “Mundessa,” Lara Ögel’s gripping new exhibition, where it constitutes both the theme and the material of works (the title refers to swept-up dust in the Adriatic Italian dialect). Ögel’s previous solo show, “Imtidad,” dealt with the public history of a Greek primary school in Istanbul and presented five dust-covered windows taken from the school depot. “Mundessa”’s focus is the domestic. The installation All Seeds, 2018, features a sculpture made of lace and an elastic band, resembling a skirt of the kind commonly used to protect beds from dust. But the band circles a void

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  picks May 11, 2018

  Aydan Murtezaoğlu and Bülent Şangar

  A drawing of an extended queue welcomes visitors to an alluring survey of Aydan Murtezaoğlu and Bülent Şangar, two pioneering figures of Turkish contemporary art who came to the fore in the 1990s. On the tail end of the succession in Unemployed Employees-I found you a new job!, 2006–18, men do push-ups, carry heavy materials, balance on ladders: tests for employment in the state or the private sector. The collaborative work also includes a performance in which recent university graduates fold T-shirts on an assembly line while chatting about their precarity. The three floors that host these

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  picks April 13, 2018

  Ali Mahmut Demirel

  Specters of bygone times haunt Ali Mahmut Demirel’s work, which explores themes of decay and desolation. The individual parts of his video series “Post-Apocalyptic Utopias,” 2015–18, make up the majority of the pieces in this exhibition. In The Pier, 2015, the camera lingers on remnants of Scheveningen Pier, a leisure facility near The Hague built in 1959, after Nazis demolished the original pier for fear of an Allied invasion. A casino and restaurant were its main attractions, but the pier went bankrupt in 2013. Demirel filmed its state of decline two years later: dead bugs on gray surfaces,