Domestic Tools, Radical Gestures: Elif Uraş & Zeren Göktan

To coincide with the 18th Istanbul Biennial, numerous exhibitions have unfolded across the city, yet two in particular demand closer attention.  Both are conceived by women artists whose practices engage deeply with materiality, embodiment, and socio-political narratives. Elif Uraş’s exhibition Earth On Their Hands, presented at Galerist from 9 September to 8 November 2025, explores the entanglements of labor, identity, and the domestic sphere. In parallel, Zeren Göktan’s Between You and Me, which opened at Pilot Gallery on 4 November and runs through 6 December, offers an intimate yet critical lens on interpersonal dynamics and structures of power.

Imagine a world without edges—where sharpness dissolves and only rounded, soft contours remain, evoking circularity, continuity, and repetition. In this space, Elif Uraş constructs a new kind of archive, one that elevates and dignifies women’s labor by gilding the gestures of daily life: working, cooking, sweeping, chatting. It is as if the painted muses on ancient Greek vases have stepped out of their frozen poses and taken up residence within the vessels themselves. Liberated from their ornamental stillness, they are no longer passive sources of inspiration but active agents—architects of their destinies and of the world they shape. Uraş’s focus is not on exceptional or heroic women, but on everyday women, whose ordinary gestures hold the collective force of all women.

Now envision stepping into a space shaped by Zeren Göktan—one that breaks away from conventional representations of the female body. Here, the figure is stripped of familiar symbolic codes, rendered in a stark black-and-white spectrum, and surrounded by objects historically attached to the domestic sphere. Yet this visual restraint is sharply interrupted by a burst of color: yellow, green, orange, and blue trowels positioned beside the brooms at the center of the gallery. They signal the possibility of tactical, multidirectional thinking within a context that often insists on a single prescribed path. Each trowel carries a distinctive surface: not merely a field of color but a QR code embedded into its pattern. When scanned, the code leads to Anıtsayaç, a digital memorial created by the artists. The site records, year by year since 2008, the names and stories of women who have been victims of femicide in Turkey. Through this gesture, the trowels become both instruments of labor and conduits of remembrance, binding the exhibition to the urgent realities that shape women’s lives.

While Words in Their Hands by Uraş centers on material forms such as vases, plates, and coins, Between You and Me by Göktan leans toward fine art practices. This includes photography and spatial installations composed of solid objects positioned within the gallery. Despite differences in medium, form, and visual language, the two exhibitions share striking points of contact. Both artists draw on everyday objects and gestures, yet each mobilizes them toward distinct conceptual ends. What ultimately forges a dialogue between their practices is their mutual decision to foreground the most unassuming of tools—the broom—transforming it from a domestic implement into a charged symbol of agency, memory, and resistance.

Uras monumentalizes the female figure through everyday gestures gilded in gold—a key material in her practice. In her hands, brooms become staves, domestic tools elevated into symbols of resistance and transformation. Her focus is on the capacity of women to reshape themselves and the worlds they inhabit.

Göktan’s approach echoes this impulse. She also adopts the broom as a sign of resistance, crafting brooms and trowels and exhibiting them beside the question “How do you make your own broom?” The gesture encourages visitors to consider how they construct alternative paths within their daily lives.

Both exhibitions share a deep connection to the earth. Uraş reminds us that pottery is rooted in agriculture, and many of her works show women harvesting or merging with unusual tree forms. Clay—drawn directly from the ground—functions for her as both archive and prophecy.

Göktan situates her female figures within dense natural settings of thorns, weeds, trees, and lightning. Blurred and partially obscured, their bodies recede while their gaze asserts itself. As Between You and Me suggests, the encounter is relational rather than possessive: not a gaze that objectifies, but one that meets the viewer, proposing coexistence and shared presence.

Uras’s artistic intent is closely aligned with this perspective: for her, the female body is an active subject, endowed with its agency, strength, and creative force. This is why the body occupies such a central place in her exhibition—standing in contrast to Göktan, who shifts emphasis toward the gaze. Uraş, however, does not rely on standard bodily forms; she deliberately amplifies and distorts them. At times the figure becomes thin and rounded; at others it expands into a vase-like silhouette with pronounced feminine features. In several works, the body itself becomes a vessel—literally carrying or containing other women—turning form into a site of collective presence.

Returning to the broom as a shared symbol of resistance in both exhibitions—a tool through which each artist seeks to reimagine women’s conditions—we can trace another layer of meaning through the Turkish idiom “saçını süpürge etmek” (“to make one’s hair a broom”), which evokes women’s traditional roles of domestic service and self-sacrifice. Historically tied to submission and household labor, the broom has undergone a profound re-signification. In the hands of Elif Uraş and Zeren Göktan, it becomes a marker of agency, defiance, and transformation—an everyday object charged with new political and poetic possibilities.