ISTANBUL.- The Türkiye Pavilion at the 61st International Venice Biennale presents A Kiss on the Eyes, an exhibition by Nilbar Güreş, curated by Başak Doğa Temür.
Taking its title from the Turkish phrase “Gözlerinizden öperim”—a traditional closing remark used at the end of a letter or conversation—the exhibition brings together existing works and new productions spanning sculpture, installation, painting, and mixed-media works on paper and fabric.
Nilbar Güreş is celebrated for her poetic, critical, and witty engagement with cultural symbols, social inequalities, and questions of identity. Her substantial body of work traverses photography, video, collage, and textiles, and has in recent years expanded into three-dimensional forms. For the Türkiye Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, she presents a series of large-scale sculptures and installations produced between December 2025 and March 2026 through an intensive, collaborative process in Istanbul with sculptors, metalworkers, tailors, and craftspeople. Treating material not only as formal element but as carrier of memory and labour, these new works are presented alongside selected pieces from earlier periods of her practice.
In her curatorial statement, Başak Doğa Temür writes: “The exhibition unfolds through spatial relationships rather than a linear narrative. Works remain close to the ground, lean, hang, or hover. Instead of guiding the viewer from one work to the next, the exhibition invites them to slow down and become aware of their own bodily position in relation to the space and to others. Moving through the exhibition becomes a negotiation between distance and proximity, vulnerability and resistance.
Such an approach characterises Nilbar Güreş’s work across multiple media, drawing on lived experience to address questions of gender, migration, and belonging. Her practice is shaped by situations marked by displacement, racism, xenophobia, and discrimination based on religion and belief, not as distant subjects but as conditions that structure everyday life. She often focuses on moments where social norms and power relations become visible through bodies, relationships, and acts of looking.
Materials such as textiles, garments, domestic objects, and organic forms play a central role in her work. These materials carry personal and collective histories and are altered through gestures of care, humour, and resistance. Intimacy and political tension exist side by side, allowing vulnerability to appear without connotations of passivity.”
The curatorial statement and further information available here.
Publication
A bilingual (Turkish and English) publication accompanies the exhibition, co-published by İKSV and Mousse Publishing. Alongside essays by Başak Doğa Temür and Franz Thalmair, closely engaging with the artist's practice and the exhibition, the book includes a selection of poems by Margaret Atwood, Joy Harjo, Etel Adnan, Bejan Matur, Diya Ciwan, Sappho, Birhan Keskin, Audre Lorde, Jîla Huseynî, and Avedig Isahakyan—chosen for their resonance with the exhibition's themes of displacement, memory, and plurality.
The publication will be available at La Biennale bookshops and selected art bookshops worldwide, as well as the Mousse Publishing website.
