Velvet Stare
Curated by Emre Baykal, organized by Arter, İstanbul. September 2025 - April 2026.

Marking the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Türkiye, Velvet Stare brings together a comprehensive selection from Nilbar Güreş’s oeuvre at Arter – encompassing works from the early 2000s to her most recent productions. Blending storytelling with critical perspectives, the exhibition constructs a vibrant world where humans, animals, plants and mythological motifs are articulated within intricately entangled and ever-shifting interrelations.

From the beginning of her artistic practice, Güreş has embraced a wide spectrum of media and production methods, including painting, engraving, collage, photography, sculpture, and video – at times, revisiting a single idea she consistently upholds through various means, and at others, integrating multiple media within a single work. This plurality in materials, media, and production methods not only shapes the formal qualities of her practice but also reflects the multilayered nature of the themes at its core, such as the coexistence of species, hybrid forms, and resistance to marginalisation. Infused with a strong capacity for creating new vocabularies that challenge gender norms, Güreş’s works disrupt conventional structures of meaning and invite viewers to ponder alternative modes of living together.

Curated by Emre Baykal, Velvet Stare provides an extensive overview of the artist’s practice from the past twenty-five years, featuring a large body of works including her early engravings, alongside new sculptures, collages, and paintings created specifically for this occasion.

The exhibition is also accompanied by an in-depth publication that examines the different layers of Güreş’s production through new texts by Emre Baykal, Silvia Eiblmayr and Lora Sarıaslan.

Exhibition information available from July 2025 onward