Seda Gazioğlu
Do Not Feed the Artist
Merdiven Art Space
11 September – 17 October 2026
“Do Not Feed the Artist.” This warning belongs to a system in which the positions of the watched and the watcher are clearly defined. Authority writes the rule, the visitor obeys it; the body subject to that decision is never consulted. Gazioğlu reverses this instruction. Here, the warning is issued not to protect the artist, but in her name and as a threat.
Whatever you give the artist eventually comes back as art. But you no longer get to decide what form it will take.
The exhibition begins at a threshold the artist describes as “the loss of surrender”: anticipating judgement before it arrives, rehearsing the response in advance and constantly positioning oneself eventually cease to be strategies and become ingrained in one’s character.
Migration, motherhood, ambition and a country that keeps shifting the ground beneath one’s feet feed this reflex. We absorb outside voices so deeply that, after a while, it becomes difficult to tell which ones are truly our own. Control begins to look like a means of self-protection. In the end, even surrender itself becomes something to be managed.
The works are made on old Anatolian carpets that carry the memory of the ground on which domestic labour, worship and life have unfolded. Gazioğlu cuts the carpets open, intervenes on their surfaces with oil paint and stitches them back together with brass wire. She hides none of the seams; all remain visible.
What takes place here is not repair. It is an intervention that keeps the wound visible rather than removing it: a wound forced shut, held together by a suture harder than the material around it, and not allowed to disappear.
The carpet, the exhibition’s primary material, functions as a kind of surrogate body. A body that absorbs pressure and returns it in unexpected forms, like a wild animal whose response cannot be predicted when cornered.
Gazioğlu’s seventh solo exhibition continues her long-standing research into surveillance, the internalised gaze and systems that regulate the female body.
The exhibition offers no promise of healing; wounded bodies are not restored to their former state.
What is offered is not optimism, but hope.
Optimism says, “It will get better.” Hope persists even when things do not improve.
The wound is not healed. It is transformed.
Do Not Feed the Artist is on view at Merdiven Art Space from 11 September to 17 October 2026.
