It rained heavily that day: Eşref Yıldırım
Zilberman Istanbul is pleased to announce It rained heavily that day, a solo exhibition by Eşref Yıldırım.
Eşref Yıldırım’s solo exhibition It rained heavily that day unfolds around the traces that loss leaves on bodies, spaces, and images, approaching grief not simply as an individual experience but as something that moves collectively through everyday life. The exhibition began to take shape following Yıldırım’s loss of his dog, Yağmur, last year, and gradually transformed into a space of mourning after the artist experienced another loss within his family during the production process. Rather than attempting to represent grief directly, the exhibition moves through the absences, repetitions, and fractures it leaves behind. Here, loss is approached beyond the idea of mere disappearance, through the possibility that mourning itself may become a collective form of solidarity. Yıldırım connects acts of remembrance not simply to gestures toward the past, but also to ways of imagining how to exist together and form new bonds around absence.Developing through questions of media representation, power structures, and social taboos, Yıldırım’s practice increasingly focuses on personal experiences shaped by social hierarchies, gender roles, and inherited forms of prejudice. In It rained heavily that day, the intimate structure of mourning is reconsidered through the lens of social visibility. Death appears not merely as a biological end, but as a condition that is culturally constructed, suppressed, represented, and continuously negotiated in terms of how it should be experienced. The exhibition reflects on the ways grief becomes socially visible, the moments in which it is pushed into silence, and the role images play in shaping our relationship to loss.
In Yıldırım’s recent works, water emerges as a carrier of memory, both physically and symbolically. In Camouflage (2025), realized in collaboration with the Marina Abramović Institute and Museum Schloss Moyland, the artist engages with the performative legacy of Joseph Beuys to explore the fragile boundaries between visibility and erasure. In Knotting the Rain (2025), performed in the gardens of Moyland, he draws a connection between the ungraspable nature of water and the impossibility of fully holding onto loss. Presented within the framework of the Gümüşlük Music Festival, Dissolution(2025) further expands this trajectory through processes of dispersal, disintegration, and transformation. In Yıldırım's performances, the body appears not merely as an individual entity, but as a performative space shaped through collective rituals, shared memory, and fragile forms of solidarity. Across these performances, water moves alongside the body as a kinetic element that cannot be fixed, constantly shifting form while carrying the body and rendering it invisible.
In It rained heavily that day, the documentation of Yıldırım’s performances appears as sites of memory that carry the fluid nature of mourning.Throughout the exhibition, rain emerges not as a personal memory, but as something that cannot accumulate, cannot be contained, and is continually transformed. It continues to move through bodies, objects, and images in shifting forms. Yıldırım’s works move beyond framing mourning solely as a personal rupture, reminding us of its social and political dimensions.
Following the traces of this circulation, Yıldırım explores the unrepresentable nature of loss, its quiet intensity as it seeps into everyday life, and the ways grief is carried through images. Here, mourning does not appear as a process to be completed, but as a collective emotion that continues to inhabit the body and memory in changing forms.
