Wild Tales

ECE AĞIRTMIŞ

3 MARCH - 4 APRİL

Pilot is pleased to present Wild Tales, a solo exhibition by Ece Ağırtmış, on view from March 3 to April 4, 2026.

Wild Tales explores the process of growing up through the metaphor of the “jungle of life,” addressing the contradictory relationship between humans and nature, as well as the invisible traps of adulthood. Rather than depicting the human figure directly, Ağırtmış constructs her narrative through animal representations, reminiscent of fables and fairy tales. Here, animals are not merely creatures of the wild; they become symbols of the experiences one encounters while growing up, entering professional life, engaging with society, and confronting personal limits.

Fairy tales often carry moral lessons, yet many stories that seem innocent in childhood reveal harsher and more complex meanings over time—much like the traps of life that only become visible through experience. Beneath its seemingly playful surface, Ağırtmış’s world unveils themes of competition, performance, survival, and belonging.

In Time to Grow Up, the form of a cuckoo clock marks the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Its layered structure and domestic decorative language evoke a sense of interior safety, while representations of nature infiltrate this secure space. The bird expected to emerge from the clock is no longer there; the migratory finch has already flown away. Time does not simply pass—it compels growth.

Time to Fly Away extends this narrative spatially. Suspended from the ceiling, the large wooden bird appears to have exited the clock’s rooftop, embodying the possibility of departure, freedom, and rupture. The boundary between interior and exterior, domesticity and wilderness, remains suspended.

The Ugly Duckling reinterprets the well-known tale through the structure of an oversized puzzle. While spaces are designated for two ducklings, there is no place designed for the third. The issue of belonging is not framed solely as a “missing piece,” but rather as the possibility that no place was ever intended to exist in the first place.

In Employee of the Month, the metaphor of the forest is used to reflect on contemporary work culture. Leafcutter ants—figures commonly associated with diligence—parallel systems of performance and reward. What appears natural becomes a mirror of human-made structures of competition.

In Play & Prey (portraits of a cat and a frog), dynamics of power and predator–prey relationships come to the fore. Meanwhile, The Load centers on the physical and symbolic weight of growing up. Inspired by antique pull toys, the work features three wheeled platforms carrying canvases that depict an elephant at three different life stages: calf, adolescent, and adult. The wooden balls attached to each elephant’s rope represent their physical weight at that stage, while simultaneously functioning as metaphors for the burdens accumulated over time. The toy form evokes childhood and play, whereas the increasing weight reflects the responsibilities and experiences that accompany maturity. The work addresses the coexistence of lightness and heaviness within the act of growing up.

Good Luck shifts the focus to the transplantation of nature and symbolic imagery into the domestic sphere—not as decorative elements, but as sites of psychological confrontation. Beneath its playful surface, themes of expectation, chance, risk, and the desire for control emerge.

The exhibition also includes selected earlier works by the artist—Elements to Make a Home, Rocking Horse, You Are More Than You Know, Tagged but Untamed, Under My Bed, Privacy I & II—which 

enter into dialogue with the new body of work, expanding on themes of home, safety, memory, and belonging.

In Ağırtmış’s practice, nature is not merely landscape; it becomes a metaphor for growth, labor, experience, and social structures. Humans have built homes to distance themselves from nature, only to replicate it within domestic interiors—through cuckoo clocks, forest-patterned wallpapers, exotic rugs, and wooden furniture. Yet this artificial nature does not provide comfort so much as it reflects an internal struggle. The forest that once appeared magical and safe in childhood transforms, in adulthood, into a labyrinth with no clear exit.

Positioned along the fine line between innocence and threat, play and survival, lightness and burden, Wild Tales invites viewers to confront their own “jungle” and reconsider growth as a process that is at once playful and relentless.

Wild Tales will be on view at Pilot through April 4, 2026.