02/12/2025 - 07/02/2026

Neriman Polat
Groundless

Opening: 29 November 2025
02 December 2025 – 07 February 2026

Zilberman | Berlin is delighted to announce the solo exhibition Groundless of Neriman Polat. Following Merciless (2018) and Roofless (2023), Groundless presents the third part of an exhibition trilogy. Its parts are linked by a common suffix – less – referring to an absence: without mercy, without a roof, without land. Neriman Polat investigates in this series the progressive loss of protection, structure and stability – physical, social, legal and existential. Her work speaks of freedom and its endangerment, of cracking foundations, of inequality, democracy, and the attempt to gain new ground in the midst of ecological and economic crises.

Neriman Polat has been active in collaborations since the 1990s – at first with the group Sanat Tanımı Topluluğu (STT), and later as co-founder of the female artist group Arada (“In Between”, with Gül Ilgaz, Nancy Atakan and Gülçin Aksoy). She was also a member of the collective Hafriyat, a term borrowed from the construction industry, meaning “excavation” and referring to processes that reveal. In Groundless, too, Polat draws upon this practice of collective action. Her title describes not only the absence of land, but also the loss of common ground. Working collectively, sharing responsibility, and searching for new forms of togetherness shape her artistic practice.

In Groundless, the walls are concrete gray, as if the outside had transposed itself to the interior. On one wall, we find a balcony, a protruding space between inside and outside, between privacy and the public sphere. The balcony attaches the house to the street, spills intimacy into the collective, and refers to the risk-fraught step out into the open, the step onto instable ground. A rose-patterned fabric hangs down from the railing – the motif of draping textiles is one that recurs in numerous photographs in the exhibition. The fabric is woven of tulle – a material traditionally used to avert the gaze of others. With Polat, it takes on a new meaning: the interior turns itself to the exterior and becomes visible. The rose-patterned fabric, died in black and gray tones, transforms the Romantic motif into an image of loss, violence, and memory. In Polat’s works Rose and Kaybolan, it stands for murdered women – as an expression of mourning, but also of tenacity and hope. Hanging from the balcony, the rose becomes a resistant sign of the feminine power to act; becomes a silent monument to lives extinguished and voices silenced.

Printed on one of the tulle fabrics, we can read: “sel gizli gizli, yol gizli gizli, dil gizli gizli” (secret is the flood, secret is the path, secret is the language). The words are borrowed from the folk song Gönül Dağı by Neşet Ertaş (1938–2012), a central figure of the Anatolian Abdal musician tradition, which is closely connected to Alevi-Bektashi poetry and music. Polat has added the words “yas gizli gizli” (“secret, secret is the lamentation”). The recurring rhythm of gizli – “secret” – evokes what is concealed and not expressed, an element characteristic of Polat’s work. Here, too, what is concealed is not unveiled; rather, it just shines through – as a light echo of pain, memory, and tenderness.

The motif of the threshold reappears in the photograph Kayıp. A red children’s jacket hangs from a branch that reaches out over a wall into the neighboring courtyard. Our gaze falls into a narrow interior courtyard, surrounded by high walls and the rear facades of buildings with enclosed balconies and bay windows. The bright red down jacket, which once provided warmth, recalls intimacy and touch. The branch that holds it makes as it were a feeling gesture, a quiet expression of solicitude in the midst of separation and stasis. This image, too, refers to the attempt to hold onto ties, where borders appear impossible to cross.

Many of the fabrics that Polat employs in Groundless come from markets – they are industrially manufactured, globally distributed materials, which promise comfort and happiness and thus betray their own emptiness. By sewing, painting over, and darkening them, Polat transforms them into vessels of lived experience. The process of darkening, as the artist says, also involves revealing. In works like O Freedom or Open Visit, overpainted grid patterns recall windows, but also cells – images of isolation, but also of togetherness: every square stands alone, yet is linked in the whole. Other works refer to ecological and economic crises. In Döşemelik, a nearly five-meter-long black-painted ribbon of fabric unfurls from the wall into the room – an image for the sinking of the ground, for the loss of stability and of the basis of our livelihoods. In Kırık, Polat translates the veins of a marbled fabric into dark lines: aridity, cracks, the traces of an earth that threatens to disintegrate. The images of drought, water scarcity, forest fires, and earthquakes stand for a landscape in a state of emergency. A Fall of the Net Bag and Two Handkerchiefs draw upon commonplace materials – shopping nets, handkerchiefs, everyday textiles. They evoke economic inequalities, human intimacy, and crises of supplies. They bear the traces of quiet forms of resistance.

In On the Road, Polat herself embodies the Grim Reaper, a female figure of death, wandering through a wide-open, barren, almost mythical landscape in western Anatolia. At a distance, we see her walking down a path towards us, accompanied by the insistent chirping of cicadas – loud as the Furies. Death here appears as a figure of retribution and return, in a landscape that is both remembrance and premonition, haunted by the ghosts of past and future injustice.

Polat’s work is characterized by the way it addresses societal power relationships, gender roles, and the conditions of visibility. It reveals how power, loss, and memory are inscribed in material traces and domestic surfaces and turns vulnerability into resistance. Her practice is shaped by caring and precision, borne by empathy and the search for collective forms of responsibility.

Text: Lotte Laub
Translation: Darrell Wilkins

Neriman Polat (born 1968 in Istanbul, where she also lives and works) studied painting at the Mimar Sinan University of the Fine Arts. She was a member of the collective Hafriyat (2000–2009) and counts among the most influential voices of contemporary art in Turkey. Her works have been exhibited internationally in museums and institutions, including SALT Beyoğlu (Istanbul), Depo (Istanbul), Istanbul Modern, the ifa-Galerie Stuttgart, the Academy of the Arts (Berlin), and the artist house Palais Thurn und Taxis (Bregenz). She has participated in numerous Biennales, including the 6th Biennale of Istanbul (1999), the Turkish Pavilion of the 50th Biennale of Venice (2003), the 10th Biennale of Istanbul (2007), and the inaugural Turkish Textile Biennial (2023). Her solo exhibitions include Roofless (Zilberman, Istanbul, 2023), Breaking the Seal: A Selection 1996–2019 (Depo, Istanbul, 2019), Merciless (Merdiven Art Space, Istanbul, 2018), and Threshold (Disambigua Art Space, Viterbo, 2015). Polat’s practice moves among photography, video, installation, and textile working, addressing questions of space, gender, urban life, and memory.