ISTANBUL.- SANATORIUM presents Kerem Ozan Bayraktar’s solo exhibition Check Valve as the inaugural show of its new venue in Karaköy. The exhibition is on view from May 23 to July 12, 2025.

Works spanning three floors unfold within a construction atmosphere shaped by an unfinished fountain and scattered confetti. The exhibition engages with expressive actions such as performing, rising from the ground, launching into the air, and exploding, each approached with different durations, speeds, and intensities. Bayraktar interprets these gestures as repeated vertical impulses that signify productivity and domination, framing them as power performances within hierarchical systems that are not specific to art but operate through self-elevating structures.

The artist examines the reproduction of power within technological systems by focusing on technical tools that generate, regulate, obscure, or articulate vectorial movements. Within this framework, he explores automation processes that enable spectacle, using AI-generated works, technical drawings, and surveillance recordings.

This aesthetic emphasizes the indifferent nature of mechanical processes and seeks to erode narratives that glorify the creative subject. It foregrounds the techniques that govern action while also aiming to evoke the tensions, dissonances, and intentions that emerge between internal experience and outward expression, and between private and public domains.

The exhibition brings together repeated film quotes, footage extracted from urban surveillance systems, and technical parts detached from their original systems. These elements form an aesthetic that resists unity. Rather than completing a singular narrative, the works occupy suspended intervals that contain temporal and spatial ruptures. Bayraktar uses such aesthetic strategies to displace fantasies of coherence, closure, and wholeness that underpin various forms of authority.

*Check valve: A valve that allows fluid (liquid or gas) to flow in only one direction.