Shadows Adrift

NIKA Project Space presents Shadows Adrift, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Istanbul-based artist Sevil Tunaboylu. Developed in part during the artist’s SAHA Residency at Swiss Institute in New York, the exhibition draws on family photographs and domestic interiors to examine the emotional structures concealed within familiar rituals of celebration.

 

The starting point for the exhibition is a group of photographs from the artist’s own family archive, taken at family gatherings. The precise occasions they document are no longer clear: a wedding, an engagement or another celebration. In several images, family members pose while feeding one another cake. Faces are blurred by movement, mouths remain open, and traces of cream cling to lips and cheeks. What first appears cheerful gradually becomes more ambiguous. An affectionate gesture also contains an element of insistence: food is pushed into another person’s mouth as the camera captures and fixes the moment.

 

Revisiting these photographs today, Tunaboylu focuses on their details and on her own reflections as she studies them. Why does one gesture survive while the larger event disappears? Why do certain objects and expressions remain vivid when the identities of the people, the occasion and its chronology begin to fade?