Artist: Dilek Yaman
Exhibition Year: 2025
Years of Production: 2004–2008 (left block), 2025 (center), 2021–2022 (right block)
Medium: Archival print
Dimensions: Variable
Location: Kirte School
Current: The Cuckoo
“Life is nothing but the act of returning home; anyone who lacks inner peace seeks a way back.”
This sentence became both the source of the movement within me and the starting point of this selection.
Current is an expression of the emotions, constrictions, and disoriented search for belonging that have recurred inside me for years. Composed of two separate archives taken nearly twenty years apart, this selection makes visible the emotional continuity between my first departure from my family and my later separation from my friends. These two distinct phases of mourning point to the same inner voice, the same desire to return home.
The production process in Kirte deepened with a new sound accompanying this inner voice: the cuckoo. Its echo became a symbol of the nomadic state within me. Like this bird, which resonates its own voice inside another’s nest, I too searched for ways of leaving traces, of inhabiting a place without truly belonging to it.
During this process, a tree that I encountered—one whose trunk spirals as it grows around itself—became the visual center of the project. This tree, bending not with the wind from outside but with a movement emerging from within, turned into the metaphor of Current: an inner motion, tremors, and yet a form of rooting and staying upright. The selection is the narrative of a process of meaning-making and deepening completed in the shadow of this tree.
Current: The Cuckoo draws from the exchange history of Kirte and treats the archive not as mere documentation but as a call. This narrative, built through space, music, and memory, forms a bridge between fragility and resilience, between past and present, between the inner and outer world. This journey, which chases the question “Where is home?”, invites the viewer to pass through the threshold between dream and reality.
The selection consists of three main blocks:
- Untitled #1–50 (left block): Archival photographs taken between 2004–2008, carrying the traces of the artist’s first rupture from the past.
- Tree (2025) (center): The spiral-trunk tree photographed in Kirte, forming the conceptual and visual core of the project.
- Untitled #51–95 (right block): Archival images produced in 2021–2022, reflecting the second separation experienced in more recent years.
BIOGRAPHY
- 1985, Bursa, Turkey
- Bursa Girls’ High School, 1999–2003
- Marmara University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Photography — Istanbul, 2004–2012
Solo Exhibition
- In Dreams, We Unite (Rüyalarda Buluşuruz)
Ferda Art Platform — Istanbul, 2024
Group Exhibitions
- Cereyan: Cuckoo Bird (Guguk Kuşu) — Kime Açar Rüzgâr Kapısını?
Ege Hub x Kirte Academy Residency Final Exhibition, Alçıtepe Village / Çanakkale, 2025 - Pieces of the Party (Partinin Parçaları) — Bashi-Bazouk Vol. 5
The Empire Project, Istanbul, 2023 - Dogs — New Year Exhibition
Ferda Art Platform, Istanbul, 2024 - Family — State of Mind
Istanbul Fashion Week, Istanbul, 2021 - Şişli’de Bir Apartıman (Photozine/Fanzine Project)
Istanbul, 2021 - O benim dünyam (That’s My World) — 1+1 Queer
Boysan’ın Evi, Istanbul, 2019 - Family
Mamut Art Project, Istanbul, 2019
Residency
- Artist Residency
Ege Hub x Kirte Academy, Alçıtepe Village / Çanakkale, 2025
Research
- Turkey Art Map Research — Participating Artist
A collaborative long-term research project with Zülal Güler, 2019–2039
