Conversation: Fatoş İrwen & Zeynep Sayın

6 p.m.

Zilberman Istanbul

We are delighted to invite you to the talk with Fatoş İrwen and Zeynep Sayın. The talk takes place on the occasion of İrwen’s solo exhibition Rû Bi Rû at Zilberman | İstanbul.

Meaning “face to face” or “confronting one another” in Kurdish, Rû Bi Rû approaches Fatoş İrwen’s long-standing engagement with the individual’s struggle for freedom in the face of representations of power, state policies, tradition, and systems of belief through the notion of confrontation.

The confrontation proposed by Rû Bi Rû extends beyond remembering the past. It involves bringing something before oneself, but also standing before it, exposing oneself to the gaze of what has been denied. İrwen’s engagement with realities that have been suppressed and rendered invisible, left unrecorded, and only orally passed down forms the ground on which this confrontation takes place.

Rather than reducing the stories she has listened to since childhood to images of testimony, İrwen creates new traces from the forms of lived experience, transmitted narratives, and histories carried into the present. Stories excluded from official narratives, censored, or silenced thus emerge not as evidence meant to verify the past, but as images that continue to exist in the present, confronting the viewer with their own position as witness.

Extending into the geography where the artist was born and raised, Rû Bi Rû places the viewer within a land without borders, where different times, bodies, and forms of life intertwine with one another. İrwen’s relationship with objects points to a form of resistance, releasing them from the status of passive fragments left behind by the past. A desire for justice reaching from earth to sky; a strand of hair severed from the body, connecting reality with the imagined while resisting forms of domination. A dried riverbed surrounded by thorns, concealing traces of bodies and violence; a city silhouette overgrown with plants that continue to flourish despite all that has come before, pierced by shafts of light: these elements converge within the exhibition’s geography.

The solo exhibition Rû Bi Rû by Fatoş İrwen runs until November 21, 2026.

* The talk will be held in Turkish.