To return is never simply to arrive where we began.
Borrowing its title from Pedro Almodóvar's Volver (2006), Volver / Dönence explores the shifting relationships between memory, identity, belonging, and transformation. Rather than approaching homecoming as a nostalgic return to something left behind, the exhibition considers the ways in which personal histories, places, and experiences continually resurface, shaping who we are and how we inhabit the present.
The notion of return extends beyond geography. It can take the form of an encounter with one's former self, the reappearance of a forgotten memory, a confrontation with inherited histories, or the reconstruction of something once familiar. The Turkish title, Dönence, introduces a complementary sense of circularity and recurrence, suggesting that our movements through time are rarely linear. What returns is never quite what departed.
Bringing together fourteen artists working across painting, photography, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition unfolds through different approaches to the body, material, memory, and space.
In Cansu Yıldıran's photographic practice, the search for home becomes an ongoing negotiation between personal identity, collective memory, and belonging. Asya Çetin's intimate photographic encounters similarly reflect on the relationships through which identity is continuously formed and redefined. Arda Asena approaches the body and its surroundings as interconnected surfaces that carry traces of lived experience, while Mizuki Nishiyama draws upon ancestry, ritual, and material histories to consider the ways the past remains physically and psychologically present.
Elsewhere, the familiar takes on more ambiguous forms. Eren Göktürk's carefully constructed photographic scenes transform details of everyday life into strangely recognisable yet disquieting narratives. Enes Debran's portraits resist fixed identities, suspending their subjects between presence and absence, recognition and anonymity. In Yaz Taşçı's paintings, gatherings of bodies and gestures of intimacy suggest the fragile spaces of belonging that emerge through human connection, while Zeynep Solakoğlu's imagined worlds explore personal transformation through characters and forms that appear to exist between different states of being.
Questions of transformation also emerge through the material and spatial language of the exhibition. Defne Cemal's layered surfaces investigate the unstable relationship between perception, light, and materiality. Ece Yalçın reconsiders the overlooked objects and structures of everyday environments, challenging the functions and meanings assigned to familiar spaces. Gökçe İrten's fragmented visual worlds examine the relationship between individual experience and the surrounding city, while Ahmet Civelek's investigations of material, destruction, and cultural identity reveal the tensions embedded in inherited forms. Seza Paker's associative, multidisciplinary practice opens further possibilities for thinking through memory and the relationships between images, objects, and histories.
Together, these different artistic positions resist a singular understanding of return. Instead, they suggest that belonging is neither permanent nor necessarily tied to a place, but something continuously negotiated through experiences, relationships, and the passage of time.
The exhibition also coincides with a defining moment in OG Gallery's own trajectory. Entering its third year, OG opens its new home in Istanbul's historic Elhamra building on İstiklal Avenue. Following two years of exhibitions, collaborations, and international presentations, the gallery brings together artists who have shaped its programme alongside new voices, creating a dialogue between its history and its future.
As the inaugural exhibition in this new space, Volver / Dönence marks both an arrival and a beginning. The gallery's own transition mirrors the exhibition's central proposition: that returning is not an attempt to recover the past, but an opportunity to reconsider it, allowing familiar relationships to take on new meanings.
Perhaps home is not something we return to, but something we continuously remake.
Participating Artists
Arda Asena · Cansu Yıldıran · Eren Göktürk · Defne Cemal · Asya Çetin · Ahmet Civelek · Mizuki Nishiyama ·
Bülent Özgören · Zeynep Solakoğlu · Enes Debran · Yaz Taşçı · Gökçe İrten · Ece Yalçın · Seza Paker · Courtney Andrews
