I graduated from the Painting and Art Education Department at Dicle University in 2004. However, my relationship with art education had already begun during my university years, in 2001, through the work I carried out with children working on the streets of Diyarbakır. Meeting the Association for the Development of Social and Cultural Life (SKYGD) at that time became an important turning point in my life. I received training from Sonja Bohländer Tanrısever, Zafer Kırac, Serra Müderrisoğlu, Serpil Deniz, Gokhan Deniz, Gazi Selcuk, Sadan Selvi, Cengiz Çiftçi and Abdullah Katay in children’s rights, community-based social work, pedagogy, art education and the Reggio Emilia approach. We received various forms of training at SKYGD for approximately two years. Following this process, in 2003, we founded the Association for Children Under One Roof. In this way, we established a local organisation and began extending our work with children beyond Diyarbakir to different cities in the region. During those years, I also began to experience art as not merely something that is produced, but as a powerful language through which people can express themselves and establish relationships with others.

I have been working in art education with children and young people for approximately 25 years. I have carried out projects with children who have experienced social exclusion and forced migration, as well as with children living in refugee camps, in different cities across Turkey. Between 2007 and 2026, I continued my work in art education at various private schools. In addition, I conducted workshops with people of different ages and from different social groups through non-governmental organisations, museums, art institutions, a psychiatric hospital and a prison. Over time, I also worked in different areas such as content development and curating.

As an artist, I move between different forms of expression, including painting, video, photography, objects and installation. Memory, nature, belonging, migration, the body and transformation have long been at the centre of my work. For me, what matters more than the material I use is the question I pursue; over time, that question finds its own language and medium.

I do not see my artistic practice and my work in art education as separate from one another. Both are about being curious, observing, asking questions, encountering others and being able to look at the world differently. I would describe myself, in the simplest terms, as an artist and art educator who thinks, creates and continues to learn through art.

” From the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

2. Your practice moves between video, photography, painting and participatory forms of production at different periods, creating a field of research that is not bound to a single medium. How is the relationship between thought and form established in your art? What determines the process through which an idea becomes a visual language?

For me, the process of making often begins with a question. I do not define myself solely as a painter, video artist or photographer. First there is a thought, a feeling or an issue; then that issue finds its own form of expression.

My relationship with video began in my second year at university. While studying art history, I encountered video art, and I was particularly interested in the work of Nam June Paik. At the time, my friend Endam Acar and I were making and editing videos and experimenting with different approaches. Sener Ozmen also made an important contribution during that period. He would watch our work and share his criticisms with us. These encounters encouraged us to focus more closely on what we wanted to say. I gradually began searching for ways to tell my own story.

I presented one of my first video works to the public at Diyarbakir Sanat Merkezi in 2003. In 2007, I participated in the 10th Istanbul Biennial with a video work. At that time, I was known primarily for my video works.

But painting had been part of my life much earlier. I remember drawing with pastel crayons on top of the stove when I was around four years old. The paint would melt and disappear; I would draw again, and it would disappear again. It was a magical moment for me.

Perhaps for this reason, I do not see video, painting and photography as completely separate fields. Sometimes a thought needs video, sometimes photography, and sometimes painting. Rather than choosing a technique, I follow a question; over time, that question finds its own medium.

” Nonexistence ” Video Art Performance

3. The Istanbul Biennial, Sinopale, Mardin Biennial and various international art platforms correspond to different periods of your artistic practice. When you consider these encounters not simply as exhibition experiences but as thresholds that shaped your thinking as an artist, what traces did each of them leave on you?

Participating in the Istanbul Biennial in 2007 was an important threshold for me. It was one of the first international art events in which I participated professionally, and it also increased my visibility within the art world. I took part in the project Gece Gezenler with a video work. One of the most striking aspects of the project for me was that the works were taken to 52 different locations in Istanbul where film screenings had not previously been held. In this way, the video encountered not only the biennial audience but also very different people in different neighbourhoods and living environments. This experience made me think more deeply about where and with whom an artwork encounters its audience.

Sinopale was a different kind of experience. There, together with Sonja Bohländer Tanrısever, Esin Tanrısever, Gazi Selcuk and Niyazi Selcuk, we conducted workshops with children over approximately 15 days. We also exhibited the works produced by the children alongside the biennial. What became important for me this time was not exhibiting my own work, but producing together and the social dimension of art.

The Mardin Biennial corresponded to a later period of my practice. My video work Ey Su was exhibited there. It was a period in which my thoughts on water, memory and geography became more pronounced.

Looking back today, I see that each of these encounters left a different trace. The Istanbul Biennial was an important threshold in terms of encountering different audiences and visibility; Sinopale in terms of producing and sharing together; and the Mardin Biennial in terms of confronting the issues that were deepening within my own practice.

” The Memory of Water ” Oil on Canvas 100×120 cm , Firat Bingol 2022

4. In your recent project Experience Rooms: Play, Memory and Shared Images, realised as part of the Cappadocia Biennial, you worked with children and young people on collective production, the transformation of individual traces into a shared memory, and the establishment of art through experience. How does this approach intersect with the concepts of memory and transformation in your individual artistic practice?

Experience Rooms, which I realised as part of the Cappadocia Biennial, was a three-stage project I developed around experiencing together with young people and discovering art as a language of expression.

In the first room, we gathered in a circle and talked about our individual differences through the idea that “everyone is equal, everyone is different.” In the second room, we worked with basic emotions. I asked participants to express emotions such as love, fear, anger or excitement using only lines, without using pictures, shapes or symbols. The aim was to remove judgements such as “drawing well” or “drawing badly” and to create a space in which everyone could express themselves freely.

The third room focused on sound, music, colour and movement. With their eyes closed, participants listened to different kinds of music and experienced the emotions evoked by the music through colour and movement.

What was important to me about this project was establishing art not merely through the aesthetic object that emerges at the end, but through the experience itself. We still encounter the idea that painting belongs only to “talented” people or that art is a hobby. Yet I see art as one of the fundamental languages through which people can express themselves.

This project also intersects with my own practice here. For me, memory and transformation are not only subjects of the artwork; they are also connected to the trace that the experience of making leaves on a person. In Experience Rooms, what mattered to me was not so much the result that emerged, but how a person moved through the experience and how they emerged from it changed.

”Cappadocia Biennial . from the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

5. In your recent works, the boundaries between the human body and natural forms have become increasingly permeable. What kind of artistic thinking lies behind your decision to consider the human being not as a subject separate from nature, but as a transforming part of it?

My relationship with nature goes further back than my recent works. The nature and art camps we organised with children and families in 2015–2016 were an important starting point for me. During that period, I began carrying my notebook with me and drawing trees, and over time these drawings developed into a tree series.

Years later, while I was again in nature, I was lying beneath a tree and watching it. Suddenly, I experienced a state that is difficult to describe. It was as though I was breathing together with the tree; I was inside it, and it was inside me. Perhaps it was a moment when I physically felt something we already know but have forgotten in everyday life: human beings are not separate from nature.

For this reason, I do not think of the human body in my work as a form independent from nature. Nor do I believe there are such definitive boundaries between a tree, water, the human body or another natural form as the boundaries we draw ourselves. Human beings exist within nature, as one of its transforming parts. The intertwining of human bodies and natural forms in my work comes from this idea of placing the human not at the centre of nature, but within it.

”Double Peace ” watercolor on paper 18×24 cm , Firat Bingol 2025

6. The tree is an important recurring image in works such as Tree Series, Freedom Hope, Double Peace and Self Viator. What does the persistence of an image for such a long period within your artistic practice mean to you? Has the tree become a symbol whose meaning has been fixed over time, or an open field of research that you reconsider in each work?

The long presence of the tree image in my practice is directly connected to my relationship with nature. The process that began with Tree Series gradually transformed into different forms and spread into other works.

In works such as Freedom Hope, Double Peace and Self Viator, I bring different symbols together. For example, a hand making a victory sign transforming into an olive tree, or a dove becoming integrated with an olive tree. There is a state of becoming one between two separate forms, as well as an intention. Concepts such as freedom, hope and peace reinforce one another within a single image.

The reason the tree has remained in my practice for such a long time is that, for me, it is not a completed symbol with a fixed meaning. In each new work, it can connect with another form or concept; it can establish new relationships with water, the body and other elements of nature. Therefore, rather than repeating the tree, I look at the same image again at different times and through different experiences.

” Integrate with Nature ” Oil on Canvas , Firat Bingol 2025

7. With Self Viator, the concepts of rooting, belonging and movement become more pronounced. When you think about the human desire both to belong to a place and to remain constantly in motion, how do you understand the relationship between belonging and freedom?

In Self Viator, I think about rooting, belonging and movement in direct relation to the human being. Here again, I begin with the tree. As a tree takes root deeper into the soil, its connection with the place where it exists becomes stronger; at the same time, it rises towards the sky. In other words, there is simultaneous growth both inward and outward.

I think something similar is true for human beings. Pursuing the question “Who am I?” and discovering one’s own roots, belongings and depth is also a form of liberation. As a person comes to know themselves and where they come from, their relationship with the world also expands.

For this reason, I do not see belonging and freedom as opposites. For me, taking root does not mean becoming fixed; it means being able to move while knowing one’s roots and remaining open to new encounters.

” In the Shadow of the Olive Tree with Vincent van Gogh” Ink pen on paper 55×70 cm , Firat Bingol 2022

” From the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

8. In works such as Freedom Hope and Double Peace, you approach concepts with broad social connotations, such as hope, freedom and peace, through images of nature. Why do you construct these concepts through natural forms rather than representing them directly?

Because I believe that the hope, freedom and peace that are valid for human beings are also valid for nature. I do not see these concepts as belonging only to humanity.

In works such as Freedom Hope and Double Peace, nature is not a background that I use to describe these concepts; it is directly part of the issue itself. Just as human beings need freedom, nature also needs a space in which it can sustain its own existence and cycles.

Therefore, when we ask for hope, freedom and peace for human beings, we cannot think of these things independently of nature. Human freedom and the freedom of nature are not separate from one another.

”Freedom Hope ” watercolor on paper 18×24 cm , Firat Bingol 2025

9. In the idea of The Memory of Water, you associate water with concepts of flow, trace, time and change. From what intellectual space did the idea of the memory of water emerge for you, and how has this concept found a place within your artistic practice over time?

The idea of The Memory of Water first emerged for me around 2016–2017. Initially, I encountered a story concerning the relationship between the Kurdish poet Fakî-yi Teyran, who lived in the 15th century, and the Tigris River. It was said that he would enter the Tigris at certain times of the day and recite poems to the river. The idea of a person speaking their words, their poetry, to water, and the water carrying those words elsewhere, affected me deeply.

This thought later developed into a nine-minute video work titled Ey Su. I made the work approximately fifteen days before Hasankeyf was submerged. In the video, I constructed a narrative around a person’s encounter with water, confronting their own reflection, expressing intentions to the water and releasing words into the flow of the water. In this way, water gradually ceased to be merely an element of nature for me and began to become a presence carrying the memory of people, geography and time.

Afterwards, my curiosity gradually deepened. An area of research emerged that extended from the scientific structure of water to the meanings it carries in different cultures and in Sufism, from its relationship with life to its microscopic world. Over time, these ideas also entered the visual world of my work. I sometimes think about water through the movement of a drop, sometimes through structures that evoke subatomic particles and DNA forms, and sometimes through forms of life emerging in the depths of the sea.

I am currently working on a solo exhibition centred on water. This process, in which I bring together video, painting and new works, is somewhat like a laboratory for me. Rather than reaching a definite answer, I am following the new questions opened up by water.

” Ey Su ” , O Water , Video Performance – Firat Bingol

“A Moment Before” Oil on canvas 50 × 70 cm , 2026

” States of Water ” – 2 , 55×38 cm , Graphite on Paper 2022 , Firat Bingol

10. Your long-term work with children and young people demonstrates that art education in your practice is not merely a pedagogical field. How have children’s and young people’s ways of looking, questioning and constructing images influenced your way of seeing and creating as an artist?

I can say that my many years of work with children and young people have contributed a great deal to me. Working particularly with the 0–5 age group during early childhood was very instructive for me and allowed me to recognise many things about my own way of seeing.

Children look at the world from a much more direct place. They often say what they want to say without going around it, and they express their emotions and curiosity more openly. They have a field of expression that has not yet been heavily shaped by judgements such as “Is it right or wrong? Is it beautiful or ugly?” They can give completely different meanings to a line, a colour, an object or something we might consider ordinary. Seeing this has influenced the way I look as an artist as well.

I think one of the most important things working with children has given me is the reminder of how valuable it is to preserve a sense of curiosity and the ability to look directly. I have been teaching children and young people for many years, but particularly my experiences in early childhood have shown me something: in fact, there is also a great deal that we can learn from children.

” From the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

11. From your curatorial experience at the 2018 Istanbul Children’s and Young People’s Art Biennial to your work today, your identities as an artist, educator and curator have created different but interconnected fields of production. When you think about these three areas together today, where do you think art truly begins for you: in the artwork itself, in the process of making, or in the relationships it establishes between people?

My curatorial experience at the 2018 Istanbul Children’s and Young People’s Art Biennial was a process that came together with the experience I had gained through my many years of working with children. We were engaged in a more collective form of working there. Bringing different forms of production, people and ideas together was important to me.

Today, I do not see my identities as an artist, educator and curator as separate fields. Producing, learning, sharing and establishing relationships with others are complementary processes.

For this reason, I do not think that art begins or ends only with the artwork that emerges. The artwork is of course important, but the production process leading up to it, the discoveries and encounters that take place during that process are also part of the work. Then comes the moment when the artwork encounters other people and establishes new relationships there.

For me, the artwork, the process and the encounter are not separate from one another. Art emerges precisely at the intersection of these.

” From the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

12. Throughout your practice from the early 2000s to the present, memory, nature, the body, movement, belonging and transformation have been connected in different ways. Beyond all these concepts, what is the fundamental question you are still searching for an answer to today, and where is this question taking you in your future work?

I am not entirely sure whether there is still one fundamental question for which I am searching for an answer. Perhaps, for me, the real issue is not the question itself but the continuation of curiosity.

My relationship with art is about love, passion and truly connecting with what you do. As people live, they change. We are not separate from nature either; we are constantly changing together with it. As we change, our way of looking at the world, the questions we ask and the areas we are curious about also change.

Sometimes, years later, I find myself moving around the same concepts. Memory, nature, belonging, the body and transformation are not subjects that can easily be completed and left behind for me. Perhaps the questions remain the same, but because I change, the place from which I look at them and the way I express them also change.

I think I can describe my relationship with art like this: We have something that concerns us, and we search for a language through which we can express that concern. For me, art is a space in which this language is continually rediscovered. As long as I remain curious, continue asking questions and searching for new ways of expressing myself, I believe my production will continue.

I do not want to know in advance where it will take me. Perhaps that uncertainty is precisely why art is still exciting for me.

” From the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

Beyond the Photograph: A Way of Looking

Some photographs do not simply show a place; they make us feel what once happened there. In the surface of a wall, the texture of a stone, a figure waiting by the shore, or an object left within an empty space, there is something beyond the image itself. Photography here does not merely record what is visible; it follows the trace of what remains unseen.

Gunes Kaplan’s photographic practice occupies precisely this threshold. At first glance, her work may appear to be an observation of place, people and everyday life. Yet, on closer examination, its central concern is less representation than tracing. Rather than explaining memory, lived experience, belonging and time directly, Kaplan transforms the traces these experiences leave upon places and bodies into a photographic language.

Kaplan’s BA in Sociology from Anadolu University is significant to this way of seeing. Yet it would be limiting to understand her practice solely through a sociological approach to photography. Her work combines documentary observation with a poetic and intuitive visual language. Relationships between people, society and place are not explained; they are suggested within the image.

This is consistent with Kaplan’s own artist statement, which describes photography as a way of investigating the emotional, social and psychological layers embedded in landscapes, architecture and everyday environments. Her practice moves between observation and interpretation, allowing ambiguity and multiple readings rather than fixed meanings.

For this reason, the first question to ask when looking at Kaplan’s photographs is perhaps not “What does this photograph show?” but rather, “What trace does this photograph carry?”

Hands Blending into Blue, 2011 — Photography

The Memory of Place

One of the most distinctive aspects of Kaplan’s practice is the transformation of place from passive background into an active carrier of experience. Landscape, architecture and everyday environments become vessels of lived experience.

This approach becomes particularly visible in The Stone Remember I and The Stone Remember II. Stone and architectural surfaces are not simply fragments of physical reality. They are surfaces marked by time, touched by people and carrying traces of the past.

“Can stone remember?” may initially seem like a poetic question, but within Kaplan’s practice it carries something more. Memory is no longer understood as belonging solely to the human mind. The traces left by lived experience in places, the transformation of spaces over time, and what people leave behind become fragments of a collective memory.

At this point, Kaplan’s photography can be read as a kind of archaeology of memory. The artist does not reconstruct the past; she searches for the traces of the past that remain in the present.

Perhaps this is where the central concern of Kaplan’s photography emerges: not finding ways to show the past, but finding ways to make visible the trace that the past leaves upon the present.

The Stone Remember I, 2013 — Photography

Where Does the Human Begin, and Where Does Place End?

Kaplan’s approach to the human figure is inseparable from this understanding of place. In her photographs, the human figure rarely appears as an isolated subject. The body is read together with its surroundings. At times it appears beneath a burden, at times waiting, and at times as a small figure within a larger environment.

The Stone Remember I makes this relationship especially visible. The seated figure is almost absorbed by the architecture. Rather than becoming the dominant subject, the person is held within a structure whose scale, material and history exceed the individual.

Traces of Burden is particularly striking in another respect. The “burden” is not simply a physical object being carried. A tension emerges between the weight carried by the body and the weight imposed upon it by lived experience.

The Waiting I creates another temporal condition. Waiting is not simply a short interval before an event; it becomes a state of existence in its own right. The viewer does not know what the figure is waiting for. We are not given its past, its future, or its complete story.

This absence matters. By withholding the figure’s biography, Kaplan creates space for the viewer to place their own experience within the image. When the figure’s story remains incomplete, the viewer’s story can begin.

Yet a critical tension also emerges here: the withdrawal of context gives the photograph a universal openness, while at the same time risking the obscuring of the specific social and geographical reality from which the image emerges. Kaplan’s poetic language is strong; its most important test, however, is whether it can remain poetic without allowing poetry to replace context.

Shutter, 2018 — Photography

The Human Within the Everyday

Shutter offers a different register of Kaplan’s relationship to the human figure. The two children are not presented as symbols detached from ordinary life; they remain within the texture of an everyday urban setting. The photograph’s directness creates a productive contrast with Kaplan’s more contemplative images.

This contrast is important because it prevents the practice from being reduced to a single aesthetic of silence. Kaplan’s attention to human presence can move from stillness and distance toward gesture, encounter and everyday activity, while retaining an interest in how people are shaped by the spaces they occupy.

Traces of Burden, 2018 — Photography

The Aesthetics of Silence

A significant number of Kaplan’s photographs are not loud images. Rather than dramatic events, they carry a sense of silence, waiting, distance and emptiness. This is one of the central characteristics of her photographic approach.

Kaplan does not explain the image so much as invite the viewer to remain with it. Its meaning is not completed at first glance. A structure becomes more than a structure; it can evoke abandonment, time or loss. A body becomes more than a body; it can carry waiting, solitude or transition.

The empty spaces within Kaplan’s photographs are particularly important. Emptiness is not simply unused space within the composition. It becomes a space into which the viewer can place their own thoughts.

Silence, therefore, is not an absence in Kaplan’s photographs; it is a method of narration.

Yet another question emerges here: “Does an image say more when it says less?” Kaplan’s practice does not offer a definitive answer. In some works, ambiguity strengthens the poetic power of the image, while in others there is a sense that greater contextual grounding might deepen the reading. This tension is one of the elements that makes the practice compelling.

Untitled (2022), 2022 — Photography

Architecture, Social Space and the Trace of Presence

The 2022 Untitled photograph extends Kaplan’s investigation of place into a more explicitly architectural field. The worn façade, barred windows and small human figure create a layered relationship between interior and exterior, visibility and separation.

Here, architecture is not merely scenery. Its damaged surfaces and openings suggest accumulated time, while the figure’s position makes the building feel inhabited yet distant. The photograph can therefore be read as an inquiry into how social experience becomes embedded in material space.

This work also complicates the idea of emptiness. The façade is full of signs—windows, bars, cracks, surfaces and traces—yet the scene remains psychologically quiet. What is absent becomes as important as what is visible.

Echoes of the Shore I, 2023 — Photography

The Shore Is Not a Landscape, but a Threshold

With Echoes of the Shore I and Echoes of the Shore II, the shore becomes an important visual and conceptual space within Kaplan’s practice.

A shore exists between two things: land and water, staying and leaving, the familiar and the unknown, the past and the future. For this reason, Kaplan’s images of the shore cannot be understood simply as landscape photography. The relationship between horizon, water and human figure transforms the image into a psychological space.

The human figure is not presented as an agent who dominates the environment. The figure is positioned as a small presence within it. This difference in scale makes the relationship between the individual and the world visible.

The shore therefore carries one of the central concepts in Kaplan’s practice: the idea of the threshold. The feelings of waiting, transition and uncertainty that recur throughout her photographs converge here within a single spatial image.

The Waiting I, 2024 — Photography

Waiting as a State of Existence

The Waiting I brings the threshold into the body. The seated figure is isolated against a strong field of darkness, while the surrounding landscape remains only partially legible. The image refuses narrative certainty.

What matters is not what the figure is waiting for, but how waiting changes the experience of time. The body becomes a marker of duration. The viewer is asked to remain with a moment whose beginning and ending are deliberately withheld.

In this sense, Kaplan’s use of silence becomes temporal as well as spatial. The photograph does not merely show a place of waiting; it makes waiting itself into the subject.

Untitled (2025), 2025 — Photography

From 2011 to 2025: The Transformation of the Same Questions

A chronological reading of Kaplan’s portfolio shows that her practice is not tied to a single subject, although certain questions return in different forms over the years. Beginning with Hands Blending into Blue and Ancient Traces in 2011, the selection moves through The Stone Remember I–II, Shutter, Traces of Burden, the 2022 Untitled, Echoes of the Shore I, The Waiting I, and the 2025 works.

Although these works differ formally, there is a clear conceptual continuity. Where does the human being stand? How much past can a place carry? How independent can a body be from its environment? Can an image preserve the past?

The 2025 Untitled work is particularly useful when considering this development. The small figures moving across an unfinished structure place human labour against a broad, almost empty field. The image shifts the question of memory toward construction, change and the provisional nature of place.

Seen alongside Echoes of the Shore II, also from 2025, the work suggests that Kaplan’s recurring interest in transition is not limited to one landscape or one narrative. It can appear in architecture under construction as readily as it can appear at the edge of water.

The value of Kaplan’s practice lies partly in its refusal to provide definitive answers. She returns to the same questions from different points in time. For this reason, it is more meaningful to understand her development not simply as technical progression, but as a deepening of her gaze.

Echoes of the Shore II, 2025 — Photography

Kaplan’s Position Within Photography

To describe Kaplan’s practice simply as “poetic photography” would leave out an important part of her relationship with the medium. The issue is not merely the production of aesthetically compelling images.

Kaplan works at the boundary between the documentary nature of photography and personal interpretation. She begins with a real place, a real encounter or a real body, but rather than leaving the image as it appears, she moves it into a field of emotion and association.

This approach returns us to one of photography’s fundamental questions: “Does photography record reality, or does it reconstruct it?” Kaplan’s work leans towards the second possibility.

A photograph may record a real moment, but the artist’s framing, distance, selection and use of empty space reorganise that reality. Photography, for Kaplan, is therefore not simply a means of freezing reality, but a tool for investigating the invisible relationships within it.

A New Threshold: International Contexts and London

Kaplan’s recent exhibition activity marks an expanding international dimension within her practice. Her work has moved beyond national exhibition contexts into a number of international group exhibitions, placing her photographic language before different audiences and within different artistic contexts.

In 2026, her exhibition activity includes Parallel Traces at Espacio Gallery and Into the Fold at The Holy Art Gallery in London, as well as Eye of the Universe at Design Festa Gallery in Tokyo. She has also participated in major Turkish art-fair contexts, including the VIII IAAF Bodrum Art Fair, Antalya Contemporary Art Fair and III. İzmir Art Fair.

This trajectory is significant not simply because of the number of exhibitions, but because it creates a new context in which Kaplan’s long-term photographic inquiry can be encountered outside its original geographical setting. The questions of place, memory and belonging therefore acquire an additional dimension: how does a visual language rooted in particular places travel between cultures?

Now & Beyond, the international group exhibition taking place at Espacio Gallery in London from 14–17 August 2026, represents another current point in this trajectory. It is important to distinguish this forthcoming exhibition from Kaplan’s completed exhibitions: at the time of writing, it remains an upcoming event.

A further threshold follows immediately afterwards. Kaplan is preparing for her first solo exhibition in London at Gallery Marquess, taking place from 25 September to 1 October 2026. This transition is not simply a move into a new exhibition space. It means that works produced across different periods will be reconsidered within a more cohesive context.

Works encountered individually in group exhibitions will face another question within a solo exhibition: “How do these photographs form a whole when placed together?” This question is particularly important for Kaplan’s practice. The recurring concepts across her work—memory, place, body, waiting, trace and transition—may become a more clearly articulated visual inquiry within the context of a solo exhibition.

In other words, the London solo exhibition represents a new threshold through which Kaplan’s practice to date can be read again.

What Remains After the Image?

It is easy to describe Gunes Kaplan’s photographic practice through terms such as “memory,” “place” or “the human.” Yet the deeper strength of her work emerges not from these concepts individually, but from the relationships between them.

Stone carries the past. The body carries lived experience. Place carries the trace of the human. The shore carries transition.

In Kaplan’s photographs, the boundary between the visible and the invisible never fully closes. The artist allows the viewer to complete the image. Perhaps this is why her photography is better approached not as a document, but as a trace.

A photograph freezes a moment, but Kaplan also attempts to make visible the time surrounding that moment. In a world where images are consumed with increasing speed, this approach becomes especially significant. The value of a photograph lies not only in how striking it is, but also in how long it can remain in the viewer’s mind.

Kaplan’s work resists that speed. It slows looking down. It asks us to look again at the surface of a stone, the weight carried by a body, an empty space, an unfinished structure, or a distant shore.

And eventually, it takes us beyond the photograph and returns us to ourselves. Because in Kaplan’s photographs, the central question is not only what exists within the image, but what remains after the image.

Perhaps this is why Kaplan’s first solo exhibition in London is more than simply a new exhibition. It represents a new stage in which a visual inquiry developed since 2011 is brought together, the relationship between memory and place is reconsidered, and the possibility of transforming individual images into a larger narrative is tested.

Kaplan’s photography does not simply ask us to look at a place. It asks us to consider the trace we leave within it.

For this reason, the silence in her images is not emptiness. It is where remembering begins.

The Stone Remember II , 2014 Photography

Written by Gamze Kartal

Artwork images: Gunes Kaplan’s artist portfolio