ISTANBUL.- SANATORIUM presents Sergen Şehitoğlu’s solo exhibition “Forking Paths” from June 4 to July 18, 2026. Taking its title from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the exhibition focuses on the structural dynamics of the world we inhabit through a labyrinth model constructed around constant choices, dead ends, and infinite repetitions.

At the center of the exhibition, the labyrinth offers an allegory of contemporary conditions of existence such as surveillance, guided choices, and inescapability, inviting viewers to confront the workings of this system directly. The spatial layout is shaped by an underlying algorithmic necessity, articulated through exit points, dead ends, and endless loops, so that each path emerges as the outcome of predefined variables.

Drawing inspiration from René Descartes’s take on analytic geometry, this structure treats mathematics as a system and a process, rather than an aesthetic form. Evoking a chessboard, the grid layout gives the coordinate system a spatial counterpart, while functions operate across this ground in order to generate an open-ended structure.

By transforming a mathematical form into a physical space, Şehitoğlu creates a material counterpart of an abstract system. Based on a 64x64 neighborhood matrix with predefined conditions, this structure exists not merely as an expression of rigid order, but as a closed system that operates according to its own internal rules. In this context, mathematics is stripped of its representational function and positioned as a self-sufficient mode of expression. The 17-minute video included in the exhibition, however, turns outward; toward the flow of the external world. In contrast to the labyrinth’s abstract and mathematical construction, the video addresses the individual’s relationship to the outside world through thoughts, emotions, and internal drifts.





Historically associated with complexity, chaos, and the search for a way out, the labyrinth in this exhibition is approached both as a mathematical system and as an explicit model of the emotional and mental relationship the individual tends to establish with the external world. Dead-ends, infinite loops, and forking paths bring out the non-linear nature of the structure, while also evoking the flow of thought, moments of indecision, repetitive mental process, and the search for a direction of the individual. Forking Paths positions mathematics as an autonomous subject, independent of artistic aesthetics, and reveals the unexpected resonances that this formal structure’s physical and spatial manifestations establish with the contemporary world.