A new series of works by Yeşim Akdeniz will be exhibited at Art Rotterdam 2025, featuring lamps, textile works, and silicon-metal-textile assemblages. Yeşim worked with a blacksmith master in Istanbul to produce the lamps with the title New Faces in Town. In her recent works, she has utilised materials produced in Turkey without label, such as car interior upholstery, buckles, and shoes. Such items are part of a serial production that are eventually exported to European countries. The works which will be presented together at the art fair explore themes of immigration, labour, serial production, and cultural exchange.
In her textile work series Selfportrait as an Orientalist Carpet, the artist uses the old technique of traditional blanket making which is a disappearing craft in Turkey. Many of her carpets incorporate elements of serial production, such as buckles, pepper shakers and fake potatoes. For Yeşim, these items are culture-bearing objects that embody socio-political and cultural conflicts; for instance, pepper was one of the first commodities the Netherlands began to import from the East.
Next to the lamps and textile works, the series White Cipher will also be in display. Similar to the Brown series, in White Cipher, the silicone material reminds us of skin, not only because of its colour, but also because of its tactile quality; and the objects such as sharp metal wheels, frilly-edged polishing discs, circular saws, and door locks on jade are mounted on this skin-like surface with screws. The artist here creates compositions that at first glance look soft and cute. Upon closer inspection the viewer notices that the patterns are created by using cutting and polishing construction materials that are under male power. She has collected these materials which she incorporated in this series from second-hand shops in Brussels, where she lives and works.