Don’t Play with My Emotions

Solo show
19.04.2022 - 28.05.2022
PILEVNELI | Dolapdere
Written by Ayşegül Sönmez

PILEVNELI will host Berlin-based artist Esra Gülmen’s first solo exhibition in Turkey between the dates of 19 April — 28 May 2023. Though the artist titles her exhibition, “Don’t play with my emotions”, the artist does in fact play with emotions and opens up a space for the audience to do the same while designing a whimsical playground with different mediums and techniques. Alongside the use of fine arts materials like paper, canvas, fabric and marble, she uses daily objects and musical instruments like a canvas. In this way, she invites the audience to contemplate their daily emotions, habits and ways of loving and being loved within the temporary, volatile fiction she has built. While trying to expand the definition of writing and drawing as an artist, Esra Gülmen focuses on the reality of her own century by evoking the “caligrams” of the early twentieth century. At times, she personalizes familiar discourses in popular culture, while in other instances she anonymizes a personal phrase.

For this cause, she knows no bounds with respect to the materials she uses. Because, according to Gülmen, making an exhibition itself is the place and time to think about where we
originate, including its process and result. This exhibition, which presents an opportunity to know Esra Gülmen closely, offers the most comprehensive view of her practice to date, and hopes that viewers open their eyes to it.