The Snake Charmer's Garden

EMİR ERKAYA

4 SEPTEMBER - 11 OCTOBER

PİLOT launches the season with Emir Erkaya’s a new solo exhibition, “The Snake Charmer’s Garden,” featuring his recent works. Opening on September 4, the exhibition invites viewers into a magical world at the intersection of history, mythology, and storytelling traditions. While offering a journey that extends from the rituals of ancient cultures to the oral storytelling heritage of Anatolia, the exhibition builds bridges between the defining forces of nature and the collective memory of humanity.

Erkaya’s recent works present a fantastical panorama of a world populated by animal-like humans and human-like animals, dancing figures, garden landscapes, and boundless vegetation—sometimes submerged, sometimes burning. Influenced by the tradition of miniature painting, botanical illustrators, the music of Jan Garbarek, and the vision of contemporary poets and writers like Lale Müldür, these compositions reinterpret a vast historical stratum—from Ancient Egypt to Mesopotamia, from shamanism to the tradition of the meddah—through a contemporary language.

The 'gardens' at the heart of the exhibition function as metaphors: they symbolize a life cycle adorned with ruins and diversity. The artist draws parallels between geographies devastated by war and shaken by past uncertainties, and the political, social, and ecological turmoil of today. In these new paintings, Erkaya emphasizes the power of geography in shape human consciousness, while also addressing the 'fantastic' and 'fictional' aspects of history with a sarcastic tone. 'The Snake Charmer’s Garden' narrates the history of storytelling through a series of paintings that highlight the constructed nature of rituals, mythology, and capital-H History. The Ottoman evenings, where candles were carried on the backs of turtles, intersect with the sunlit gardens of Bastet, the feline goddess of Egypt.

Plants emerge on Erkaya’s canvas within a historical-fictional matrix. While history functions as a fictional material in the artist’s hands, the plants are depicted as accurately as possible in accordance with their geographical context. While constructing his inventory of flora with archaeological precision, the artist transforms plants into carriers of humanity’s collective unconscious. Here, botany transcends the boundaries of symbolism and becomes a temporal medium: the ritualistic meanings of antiquity intersect with the fragility of modernity. Erkaya overlays the anatomy of plants onto the anatomy of history, producing a kind of X-ray of possible histories.

These works by Erkaya are a manifestation of the artist’s personal dialogue with history. Nourished by the ancient past of Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, the pieces bear traces of humanity’s ontological relationship with nature. Rituals and ceremonies appear both as anthropological phenomena and as concrete embodiments of a collective unconscious that has evolved over thousands of years. The power of geography to shape the human mind generates a sphere of influence that stretches from mythological archetypes to neurological processes, reminding us that traditions are not formed suddenly, but evolve gradually over time. The sense of impermanence hidden in the ruins of history transforms into a philosophical inquiry into existence, merging with the traces of lost civilizations. Yet, this exhibition does not treat the past as an object of nostalgia; by highlighting the fantastical and contemporary aspects of history, it invites the viewer to build new connections between the ancient and the modern. Each work reinterprets this deep-rooted heritage through a critical contemporary lens, affirming that history is a living and dynamic phenomenon In this sense, the artist redraws a kind of historical landscape—evoking feelings of joy and curiosity, and pointing toward hope and possibility even in unsettling times.

The exhibition can be visited at PİLOT, located at 85 Sıraselviler Street, until October 11.