Join us for the opening on March 21, from 6–9 pm!
21.03.–25.04.2025
Yeşim Akdeniz’s practice is infused with symbolic narratives. These narratives reflect cultural production, negotiation, and appropriation. They explore the movement of forms, materials, and labor. Her work examines the intersections between craft and industrial production. Central to her work is a distinct visual language of symbolism, through which she weaves personal and cultural references, offering layered interpretations of history, identity, and collective memory.
At the core of the exhibition is a series of iron-welded lamps, created (in collaboration) with a craftsperson in Istanbul, embody the intersection of handmade and industrial production. Alongside these lamps, the artist integrates mass-produced yet unbranded objects—buckles, car upholstery, and other industrial remnants—materials that move through supply chains largely unnoticed.
Much like the workers who handle them, these objects traverse industries and geographies, influencing cultures without acknowledgment or authorship. The exhibition explores the interplay between the handcrafted and the manufactured and the visible and the unseen. It shows how histories of migration, labor, and power are embedded in everyday materials. These elements reveal the silent forces that shape our interconnected world.
About the Artist:
Yeşim Akdeniz (b. 1978 in Izmir) graduated from Art Academy Düsseldorf in 2002. She participated in the De Ateliers residency program in Amsterdam from 2002 to 2004. She received the Kunstverein Bonn/Peter Mertes Stipendium in 2005. Her work has been exhibited in many institutions. These include Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunstverein Frankfurt, and MAK Museum Vienna. It also includes Sammlung Philara in Düsseldorf, Kunstverein Bielefeld, and Kunsthal Mechelen in Belgium.
Yeşim Akdeniz’s practice engages with Orientalism, gender and queer studies, and cultural appropriation. Primarily focused on painting, her work is infused with symbolic narratives that can be read as signs of cultural production, negotiation and appropriation. Her most recent series of works combine autobiographical elements with (art) historical narratives. These works position questions of identity formation alongside the ascriptions and self-attributions of objects, which serve as representations of political structures.The artist currently lives and works between Brussels and Düsseldorf.
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