Burak Kabadayi, “Whether it’s a desert or not is irrelevant,” at IMALAT-HANE, Bursa.

“Whether it’s a desert or not is irrelevant” by Burak Kabadayi, curated by Deniz Kirkali, at IMALAT-HANE, Bursa, 2.11.2024－11.01.2025.

Exhibition Text:

Burak Kabadayı‘s solo exhibition titled Whether it’s a desert or not is irrelevant, curated by Deniz Kırkalı, explores the ambiguous boundaries of seeing and knowing through illusions created by natural phenomena such as reflections and mirages. The site-specific installation includes three new video works by Kabadayı and delves into the material relationality between the desert and glass as a dynamic environment, using light, pattern, video, and sound. The exhibition creates a sense of disorientation, unsettling our familiar perception of the material world and offering a cognitive estrangement experience. This highlights the fragile relationship between habit and habitat, inviting contemplation on concepts of ambiguity, fracture, reflection, and deception by constructing fictional worlds that attempt to reveal the unseen. Kabadayı‘s fragmented narratives reveal our partial perspectives and embodied states within the networks we inhabit. They invite us to confront the limitations of knowledge, positioning bodily experience as an interpretive and partially constructed phenomenon. His work underscores that knowledge is inherently site-specific and rooted in perceptual habits.