BETWEEN YOU AND ME

ZEREN GÖKTAN

4 NOVEMBER - 6 DECEMBER

Zeren Göktan’s new solo exhibition, "Between You and Me / Seninle Benim Aramda", opens at Pilot on November 4.

The exhibition features works from the artist’s recent "Off White" photography series and an installation titled "How Do You Exist? How Do You Make Your Own Broom? How Do You Disappear?"

This exhibition presents black-and-white photographs, shown for the first time, which depict women accompanied by baby bottles, twig brooms, trees, lightning, dry thorns, and weeds. Through these images, Göktan portrays women existing and dissolving amid weeds and thorns, focusing on a woman's relationship with herself and with society through themes of generations, distances, and transformations. The bundles of thorns used in her photographs appear both as instinctive protective shields and as symbols of the contradictions and complexities within human relationships. Through these recurring images, Göktan points to the fragile thresholds between presence and absence, body and earth, self and society.

Positioned between the intimate and the collective, the "Off White" series—partially conceived as triptychs—unfolds as an intergenerational journey: a woman shielded from lightning, a young girl facing her first disappointment, and a mother. In these photographs, women who emerge and fade within tangled thorns are transformed into luminous stars, inviting the viewer to engage and reflect.

Presented alongside new works from the "Off White" series, the installation "How Do You Exist? How Do You Make Your Own Broom? How Do You Disappear?" draws inspiration from a common and often overlooked object in public spaces—an object made of plastic containers, wooden sticks, and twigs, inherently open to change and recycling. The phrase "How do you make your own broom?" poses the question of how we can develop our own alternative worlds and forms of resistance through small gestures or tactical thinking, and how we might create spaces to breathe.

The symbols Göktan employs are closely connected to everyday objects rooted in daily life. Elements such as baby bottles, thorns, and brooms reflect the different roles women undertake throughout their lives, societal expectations, and modes of resistance. The women in these photographs are not merely surrounded by these objects; they transform them, making them integral to their own existence. Thus, the ordinary and familiar gain new layers of meaning through the artist’s gaze and practice.

In Göktan’s photographs, female figures are neither eroticized nor idealized; instead, within their own realms—among thorns, brooms, weeds, and lightning—they become subjects reclaiming their own gaze. The female body is no longer an object to be observed but a subject that constructs its own way of seeing. The figures, surrounded by baby bottles, brooms, thorns, and weeds, appear both visible and absent, existing in a luminous state between being and non-being.

Göktan’s practice opens a space to question how the female body has been represented, seen, and by whose gaze throughout history. Her works are not merely visual surfaces but offer a way of thinking that displaces the power of the gaze.

In Göktan’s new exhibition "Between You and Me", this relationship with the gaze becomes even more intricate. The photographs, structured as triptychs, intertwine the gaze of one woman with that of another—the viewer. Göktan reminds us that seeing is not a one-way act but a relational field. The natural elements surrounding the female figures—lightning, weeds, thorny branches—cease to be mere metaphors and become part of the gaze itself. This multiplicity of gazes resonates in the exhibition’s title: "Between You and Me." Here, the gaze is no longer a tool of possession or representation, but an encounter—a state of co-existence. Göktan transforms the gaze from a display of power into a poetic ground where resistance and delicacy, silence and visibility intersect.

Zeren Göktan’s new exhibition "Between You and Me" will be on view at Pilot starting November 4.