Where nearness flickers and distance breathes in the works of Zeren Göktan

Feature Image: İlk Hayal Kırıklığı” / The First Disappointment” 130×97.5 cm, 2025

In Between You and Me, on view at Pilot Gallery (4.11.-6.12.25), Istanbul, artist Zeren Göktan weaves a quietly forceful constellation of bodies, landscapes, and inherited memories. Thorns become vessels of remembrance, brooms turn into counter-rituals, and several generations of women navigate the charged terrain between nearness and distance—an ecology of the in-between.

Between You and Me, Something Happens

Zeren Göktan is not fond of quick interpretations. “I’m playing with light and shadow,” she says in the gallery, inviting to join her on a conversational walk through the exhibition at Pilot Gallery. The opening work presents a naked woman in a protective posture, setting the tone for the intimate exploration that follows.

“Çök, Bağlan, Koru” (Kneel, Connect, Protect)” gallerist Azra Tüzünoğlu comments. “A staged bolt of lightning illuminates the figure without making contact, thereby generating a liminal, shimmering space. This interval invites contemplation of relational dynamics—between self and storm, self and other, and self and cosmos—while ultimately leaving the interpretive horizon open to the viewer upon entering the exhibition space.”

The Memory Carried by Thorns

“Kuru dikenler ölü doğayı değil, doğanın hafızasını taşır,” Zeren Göktan says.
(“Dry thorns do not signify dead nature; they carry nature’s memory.”)

Dry thorns and brittle stems—so often dismissed—become, in Göktan’s vision, the archives of an uncultivated world. They sway between tenderness and threat, between affinity and estrangement. “Aramızda bir şey vardır… hem bağlar hem ayırır.” (There is something between us… something that binds as much as it separates),” the artist continues. Black and white tones carry a fragile tension—a shimmer that drifts between closeness and distance, between connection and dissolution.

It feels only natural that Zeren Göktan speaks of her roots in painting; her compositions breathe with that heritage. The working process—the sourcing and staging of objects, the protection of the hands from thorns, and the calibrated use of illumination—constitutes a mode of practice in which the artist must enter into an intensified engagement with nature while simultaneously mediating it through a deliberately restrained gesture to articulate her vision. The process itself generates the affective charge that the work ultimately emits. Göktan invites us to inhabit this charged interval in which proximity and withdrawal converge.

Mothers, Daughters, Selves: Several Generations, One Weave

While contemplating thorns and memory, Göktan first photographed her mother. Then herself. And, for the very first time, her daughter—her small arm in plaster after an accident—seated on a broken branch in a dusky woodland setting. The image bears the title İlk Hayal Kırıklığı (First Disappointment).

“Anne ve kız ortada buluşuyorlar,” Göktan says —
(“Mother and daughter meet in the middle.”)

Here, several generations of women encounter one another, each carrying her own roots, thorns, woundwounds,reservoirs of strength.

Bodies and Landscapes as Reciprocal Forces

The subtle allusion to Botticelli emerges through the gentle orchestration of her compositional framing. Göktan’s photographs evoke the sensibility of Renaissance painting, articulating a tender choreography of light and shadow. Across the exhibition, bodies appear to merge with trees, shrubs, and thickets, forming hybrid constellations of human and vegetal presence. In one image, a woman rests her head against a broom, her dark hair visually dissolving into the bristles—an earthy, understated echo of Botticelli’s Venus, not borne ashore on a seashell but instead reintegrated into the density of the undergrowth.”

Elsewhere, arms extend upward from a tree trunk, appearing as emergent limbs. Nature here functions not as a mere backdrop but as an active agent—at once participant, counterpart, and corporeal extension. Ormanın Kraliçesi (Queen of the Forest) breathes a quiet yet unmistakable authority. As artist, curator, and researcher Eda Yiğit notes in Unlimited Rag:

       “Göktan’ın kadın bedeniyle doğa arasındaki ilişkiye yaklaşımı romantik  bir birleşme değil, karşılıklı bir güç alanı yaratıyor. (Göktan’s approach to the relationship between the female body and nature does not seek a romantic union but generates a field of reciprocal forces.)”

The works resist pastoral sentimentality. Instead, they present sites of negotiation—between power and vulnerability, rootedness and displacement.”

 

Brooms, Shovels, and the Politics of Remembrance

At the heart of the exhibition stands the installation:

Nasıl Var Olursun? Kendi Süpürgeni Nasıl Yaparsın? Nasıl Yok Olursun?
  How Do You Exist? How Do You Make Your Own Broom? How Do You Disappear?

In Istanbul, street sweepers often construct their own tools from discarded materials. Göktan worked alongside them—learning their methods, observing their improvisations, and reconstructing the tools herself. ‘Dayanışma ve direniş biçimi yaratmak istedim,’ she notes: ‘I wanted to create a form of solidarity and resistance within public space.’

Each shovel is painted in a different color of the rainbow, forming a quiet declaration of plurality, solidarity, and a modest gesture toward a more generous future. Attached to them are QR codes leading to Anıt Sayaç (The Monument Counter), Göktan’s digital memorial documenting femicides in Turkey.

The broom—ordinarily a tool for sweeping away—emerges here as an instrument of remembrance. Its feminist resonance is unmistakable: the broom as emblem of the witch, the healer, the woman persecuted for her knowledge. To construct one’s own broom, in this sense, becomes an act of reclaiming a lineage of power.

From Blue to Off-White: A Shift in Gravity. Kırık Beyaz – Where Light Meets Shadow

Göktan’s shift into Kırık Beyaz (Off-White) signals a nuanced transition from her earlier Blue series. In Blue, the body occupied the compositional and conceptual center—weighted, sculptural, and insistently present. In Kırık Beyaz, by contrast, the body begins to diffuse into its environment. Contours soften, limbs appear to merge with branches, and corporeal presence becomes increasingly porous.

Within Kırık Beyaz, Göktan further explores the threshold between brightness and obscurity, between presence and disappearance. One figure is enveloped in a garment reminiscent of swan plumage, invoking a moment of metamorphosis. ‘I am obsessed with the black swan,’ she notes—an emblem well suited to the delicate volatility that permeates the series. It is a fitting spirit for a body of work that continuously oscillates between emergence and withdrawal, the visible and the barely perceptible.

Where Meaning Gathers

Zeren Göktan’s exhibition articulates a manifesto of the undogmatic—less a doctrine than a stance, a commitment to the complex relationalities that shape our world. It opens spaces rather than circumscribes them, allowing bodies, landscapes, and memories to interlace. Operating within a field of tension and proximity, the exhibition slows perception and renders our position in the world newly negotiable.

“Between You and Me” becomes the site where meaning gathers:
where nearness flickers and distance breathes;
where thorns become light;
where memory finds voice;
and where—between touch and separation—
We begin to discern our own place.

Sabine Büsch, Zeren Göktan, Azra Tüzünoğlu and Agnese Giunchi at Pilot gallery, 25.11.2025