The Rogue Wave

İMALAT-HANE is pleased to host “The Rogue Wave”, a solo exhibition by Fatma Belkıs, on view from September 5 to December 5, 2026. Taking its title from rogue waves—rare, unpredictable and often devastating oceanic surface waves—the exhibition proposes friendship, humour and solidarity as practices for navigating emotional emergencies. Curated by Asli Seven, the exhibition premieres a new performance and immersive installation titled “Ambulance”, written and directed by Fatma Belkıs.

The exhibition unfolds through recurring motifs of fire and water, which circulate between language, image and action. Emotional upheaval takes the form of rogue waves, storms that sweep through domestic interiors, and rain that transforms the familiar into a site of instability. Alongside these elemental forces, the Siamese connection—a specialised fire-fighting device that splits a single water source into multiple hoses—and the figure of the ambulance become material and conceptual tools for imagining emergency not as an individual crisis but as a shared condition where solidarity is built through imperfect acts of carrying, listening and remaining together. Splitting, mirroring and displacement emerge as strategies through which care, survival and shared subjectivity are multiplied across bodies rather than contained within a single self.

Organizing the exhibition’s selection of videos, watercolours, sculptures and narratives, Fatma Belkıs’ Ambulance is at once a script, a performance for four actors, and an installation unfolding through multiple “stations” as interwoven units of action and time across the exhibition space, where narratives layer, echo and fold into one another. It is also an itinerant conceptual vehicle moving between emotional emergencies and the catastrophes brought about by loss and grief. Driven by the desire to create forms of solidarity and collective meaning through failure, misunderstanding and care, Ambulance insists on the possibility of human connection even when confronted with futility and irreversible loss.

Ambulance will be premiered at İMALAT-HANE on September 5, 6.30 pm, with Fatma Belkıs, Handan Demir, Esme Madra, Basma Seiba and Can Küçük.

Please register until September 1: Registration Form

Fatma Belkıs (Antalya, 1985) lives and works nomadically. She is interested in narratives of individuals caught in processes of transformation, particularly those who refuse to undergo them alone. She works with text, video, and printed matter. While problematizing structures built on friendship and camaraderie, she focuses on interpersonal contracts and the breaches of such contracts. Her works weave together notions such as loss, grief, negotiation, conflict, digestion, disappointment, and failure.

Fatma Belkıs’ most recent solo show Your Worst Friend was held at La Tôlerie (Clermont Ferrand, 2024). Her works have been shown in To Carry – 16th Sharjah Biennial (Sharjah, 2025), Tamawuj – 13th Sharjah Biennial (Sharjah, 2017) and SALTWATER – 14th İstanbul Biennial (Istanbul, 2015). She has participated in institutional group exhibitions such as Belkıs Hanım and Onur Efendi, SALT (Istanbul, 2021); At the Blink of a Bird, nGnK (Berlin, 2019) & DEPO (Istanbul, 2017); Sweet Confiscation (performative intervention), Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm, 2018); and Close Quarters, İstanbul Modern (Istanbul, 2013). The films she directed were shown at international film festivals in Turkey, Italy, France, Germany, the UK, and the USA. She currently runs a residency project she founded on the southern coast of Turkey, Hür Adalar (Sovereign Isles), focusing on artistic research and publishing.

Asli Seven is an independent researcher, curator and writer based between Istanbul and Paris. She investigates the mutually generative relationship between fiction and reality, with a focus on infrastructure, landscape and alternative pedagogies, emphasizing methods of fieldwork and co-creation. She is curating the exhibition programs of IMALAT-HANE in 2026-2027. In 2024-25, she co-curated How To Hold Your Breath – 9^th Asian Art Biennial in Taichung, Taiwan. Among her recent exhibitions are Under Two Suns, (OMM, Eskisehir, Turkey, 2023-2024); Fabulous Machine, Radiant Beat (Saint Joseph, Istanbul, 2021); Emre Hüner – [ELEKTROIZOLASYON]: Unknown Parameter Extro-Record (Arter, Istanbul, 2021-2022) and Live Among and Turn Together (Galerie La Box Bourges, France, 2021). Between 2021-2024 was a guest lecturer at MoCo ESBA Montpellier, France, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. She is a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and C-E-A (French Association for Curators).