Zilberman Unfold'26: Sites of Relation: Group Exhibition

Since 2010, Zilberman has focussed attention on emerging artistic practices through an annual open call culminating in a summer exhibition, known for many years now as Young Fresh Different. This year’s edition carries a new name: Zilberman Unfold. Something opens up, becomes visible, goes its way. For the first time, the exhibitions in Berlin and Istanbul shared a common thematic focus and a single international jury.

Under the title Sites of Relation, we directed our gaze toward artistic practices that reflect on the conditions for their own existence: the places in which they take shape, the histories they react to, the materials they speak through, and the dependencies that condition them. Artistic practices are situated, to borrow from Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges. They gaze out from a specific place, embodied and embedded. A work is shaped by the spaces in which artists work, by the economic conditions which make it possible, by the political realities it encounters, and by the history that it inherits or challenges. These relationships do not remain extrinsic to the work. They imbue its material, its form, and its meaning. Artistic practice can render societal conditions legible. It can intervene in them. And it can trace new connections between aesthetic form and the questions facing society.

The jury brought together curatorial, artistic, institutional, and collectors’ perspectives from Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Istanbul, and New York. Its members were Ceren Erdem, Britta Färber, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Enis Karavil, İz Öztat, and Aybüke Sanuç. For the Berlin exhibition, it selected work by Jamal Ageli, Eight Fang, Philipp Farra, Gabriela Lesmes López, Isabel Monti, Elif Muhit, Vitalii Shupliak, Lotta Stubenrauch, Elvan Tekin, Johannes Thiel, and Alungoo Xatan. In Istanbul, it chose Büşra Aydagün, Jiyan Ayaz, Baran Batıbay, İrem Bekmezci, Sude Çulha, Sibel Dursun, Halit Furkan Gençtürk, Tunahan Havrandere, Rana Kelleci, and Edanur Sabuncu.

In the works presented in this edition, relation is rendered palpable through material, movement, and attention. Salt, rust, wool, latex, photographic negatives, bicycle parts, and industrial membranes appear as substances that have recorded pressure, use, loss, and touch. They carry histories of regulation, work, migration, care, violence, and memory within them. What at first appears as surface or fragment frequently unfolds to reveal a broad field of relationships. Both exhibitions also question the position of the viewer. Some works only become legible through the motion of a body. The visitor moves around a curved surface to read a text, gazes through a transparent textile, follows a gesture through the room, or waits for an image to come into focus. In these moments, relation becomes a spatial condition produced by the exhibition itself. The viewer is drawn into the ties through which the works unfold.

The works shown in Berlin often address systems of circulation, of regulation, of interrupted motion. Many ask how value, currency, and state power precipitate as materials and symbols. Salt appears as a substance used for conservation and taxation. Two Euro coins, merged and withdrawn from circulation, stand for a relationship in which inequality and solidarity are negotiated. Found negatives connect anonymous authorship with the colonial history of the Bagdad railway. Where a memory of mobility takes the form of bicycle parts one can no longer ride, where the right to freedom of movement can be exercised only by a body that reads, movement appears as both promise and refusal. Other works show the body simultaneously as object, as image, and as definition. The body no longer appears autonomous, but rather conditioned by things, images, and language. Transparent PVC strip curtains produce a shape in which the border between machine and life-form becomes fluid. Still others turn to landscape and remembrance. A two-channel video installation reads a holy mountain as a living archive of belief, ecology, and the violence it has outlived.

The works being shown in Istanbul often turn their attention to places, and ask how they are used as living spaces, how they get lost, and how history lives on in them. A machine presents the bureaucracy of urban development as a process that impacts bodies. Another asks about language, wind, and belonging. An encounter in the artist’s own village shows how relationships to a place live on, even when the buildings in them disappear. History here appears as something open, continuously shifting through materials, images, and spaces. Other works approach interrelationship through touch and impression. Wool, clay, paper, and organic processes absorb history, bodies, and landscapes. A hand-made book of frottages preserves the traces of a palace ruined and rebuilt many times, a site where contested histories of modernization have accumulated. An embossed relief lends space to the sense of touch. Clay is bound to body, tool, and earth. In wool, childhood memories gather warmth. And a photograph of living fungus shows decomposition as transformation. The body, too, returns, marked by societal conditions. A knitted mesh extends root-like into the space and becomes entwined with its surroundings. Latex casts on a piece of plaster create relationships between queer desire, visibility, and the urban ground. In these works, the past becomes tangible through touch, impression, and repetition.

Across both exhibitions, the works trace how their subjects are tied in to what surrounds them – to material, place, body, history, and the economic and political pressures they face. Often, what has not been passed on, what appears in records only as gap, as edge, or as violence, becomes the starting point for an artistic investigation. Materials, images, and spaces carry layered histories, and their meaning emerges relationally, shifting with the position from which they are perceived. Sites of Relation asks what artists create, where they create, with whom and under what conditions they create. It asks what becomes visible, what is held back, what is bequeathed, and what becomes possible when a practice brings its own conditions of existence into the work.

We are grateful to the jury for the care and thought they brought to the task of selection from a strong pool of submissions. We also owe especial thanks to the artists from both cities whose work has made the exhibition Sites of Relation possible.

Text: Lotte Laub