ANATOMY OF A FLEETING RUSH

Bilsart presents Zeynep Demirhan’s exhibition entitled “Anatomy of a Fleeting Rush” between February 14– March 08, 2025.

Building on Martin Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling,” settling is the way humans exist in the world; it is not only a physical act but also a spiritual one. The home, defined as a safe space, reflects the body and serves as a sanctuary for making sense of our experiences. As an extension of the home, the city is a construct continually rebuilt in the mind of an individual searching for a sense of belonging.

Freud defines the home through Heimlich and introduces Unheimlich (uncanny) by adding the prefix un-, describing the unsettling transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar. In this state where the familiar turns uncanny and the repressed emerges, the unconscious comes to light. According to Lacan, the unconscious reflects the individual’s hidden desires but is inseparably connected to the Other. The home’s intimate, familiar space becomes comforting and unsettling as the alienation embedded in the unconscious and the influence of the Other continuously reshape it. The human confronted with the struggle of self-realization, experiences cultural, social, and emotional alienation, blurring the boundaries between the inner and outer worlds. Wandering through the city’s streets, one encounters the repressed, other side of the home.

For the artist, living in Turkey creates a reality where the search for meaning is perpetually disrupted. Capitalist dynamics, the commodification of urban spaces, the lack of safety, and feelings of worthlessness hinder this quest for meaning. Within the economic and social constraints of the modern world, the body becomes trapped, struggling to carve out a space to breathe. A body unable to take root moves forward through these moments of suffocation, navigating through anxious times. While moving within the ambiguity and uncertainty, it seeks temporary shelters and spaces of escape. The search for a familiar place transforms from a physical shelter into a mental process. This process has no definitive end; it is continually reproduced and perpetuated within cyclical changes.

The exhibition Anatomy of a Fleeting Rush, named from a poem in Ece Eldek’s book Mânâ, materializes the tension between the familiar and the uncanny through the individual’s struggle to find their place in their surroundings. This psychological struggle raises questions about the individual’s selfhood and their relationship with their environment amid the complex dynamics of the city. The 10-minute video titled “Süregelen(Continual),” featured in the exhibition, transforms this tension and state of panic into a spatial experience through the phase change of matter. The video Yersiz Düşler (Dreams of Nowhere), on the other hand, reveals the artist’s relationship with a structure on the verge of collapse because of urban transformation.

Click here for the press kit.

ABOUT ZEYNEP DEMİRHAN

After graduation from the Department of Architecture at TOBB ETU, Zeynep Demirhan completed her master’s thesis in the Department of Cinema and Television at Istanbul Bilgi University. Her article titled “Urban Environments and Agnès Varda’s Genius loci” co-authored with Kennedy Karpat, was published by Bloomsbury, England in the book “The Sustainable Legacy of Agnes Varda.”
In her artistic practice, through semi-documentary narratives based on photography, video, sound, and performance, she explores different states of existence, forms of forgetting and remembering, and the relationships between interior and exterior. By incorporating psychogeography, these works interrogate the liminal zones between place and self, where reality and fiction intertwine.
Institutions such as the Sony Photography Awards, Royal Photographic Society, Lens Culture, Humble Art Foundations, and F-stop Magazine have recognized her photography works. They have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Beymen Art Collection, Simbart Projects, ShopigoArt, Mamut Art Project, Base Istanbul, Artweeks Istanbul, and Art Ankara.