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Burak Kabadayı‘s solo exhibition titled Whether it’s a desert or not is irrelevant, curated by Deniz Kırkalı, will open on November 2 at İMALAT-HANE. The exhibition explores the ambiguous boundaries of seeing and knowing through illusions created by natural phenomena such as reflections and mirages.

The site-specific installation, supported by İMALAT-HANE, includes three new video works by Kabadayı and delves into the material relationality between the desert and glass as a dynamic environment, using light, pattern, video, and sound. The exhibition creates a sense of disorientation, unsettling our familiar perception of the material world and offering a cognitive estrangement experience. This highlights the fragile relationship between habit and habitat, inviting contemplation on concepts of ambiguity, fracture, reflection, and deception by constructing fictional worlds that attempt to reveal the unseen.

Kabadayı‘s fragmented narratives reveal our partial perspectives and embodied states within the networks we inhabit. They invite us to confront the limitations of knowledge, positioning bodily experience as an interpretive and partially constructed phenomenon. His work underscores that knowledge is inherently site-specific and rooted in perceptual habits.

About the Artist:
Burak Kabadayı is an artist based in Istanbul, focusing on the forms of energy production-consumption and movement through installations incorporating video, sound, and various objects. His work is concerned with creating an environment through evolving, transforming structures that interact and exchange with other elements, whether natural or artificial, over time. He reimagines possibilities of coexistence/non-existence and modes of perception.

About the Curator:
Deniz Kırkalı is a curator and writer based in Istanbul and London. She is a founder of the summer program Garp Sessions and the curatorial and research collective topsoil. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Cogito, Flash Art, this is tomorrow, AQNB, and Art Unlimited. She is currently pursuing a PhD in curatorial practices at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Photography: Barış Özçetin