Oğulcan Sürmeli : Between Fire and Gunpowder

Between Fire and Gunpowder focuses on a threshold where the explosion has not yet occurred but tension is intensifying. This threshold encompasses not only political clashes but also the silent fires within the individual, society, and the system; the invisible structural constraints; and the great silences we mask with aesthetics.

The works in the exhibition question both internal and external areas of conflict. The systems of art, economy, and visibility in the modern world now operate not only through production but also through manipulation. In this context, the works are positioned as counter-objects. They are visual organisms that reveal the anatomy of the systems that have been produced, not the producer, and that problematize rather than passively accept.

Fire here represents not only destruction but also awareness. Gunpowder is the substance of accumulated potential, suppressed tension. The artist, standing between the two, neither burns nor explodes, but threatens only to show.

The exhibition transforms this void of threat into a field of production. Through figurative or conceptual images, the artist reveals how the system reproduces itself, how collective illusion becomes institutionalized, and how the aesthetic object becomes instrumentalized within the circulation of power.

The visitor is offered not just the position of spectator, but that of witness: Can a body that carries neither fire nor gunpowder, merely standing there, perceive the shadow cast by systems?