Artists

Yeşim Akdeniz

Press release

Soy Capitán is pleased to present Silent Strangers, Yeşim Akdeniz’s  first solo exhibition with the gallery. Join us for the opening on March 21, from 6–9 pm!

Yeşim Akdeniz’s practice is infused with symbolic narratives that reflect cultural production, negotiation, and appropriation while exploring the movement of forms, materials, and labor, examining the often-overlooked intersections between craftsmanship and industrial production. Central to her work is a distinct visual language of symbolism, through which she weaves personal and cultural references, offering layered interpretations of history, identity, and collective memory.

At the core of the exhibition is a series of iron-welded lamps, created (in collaboration) with a craftsman in Istanbul, embody the intersection of handmade and industrial production. Alongside these lamps, the artist integrates mass-produced yet unbranded objects—buckles, car upholstery, and other industrial remnants—materials that move through supply chains largely unnoticed. Much like the workers who handle them, these objects traverse industries and geographies, influencing cultures without acknowledgment or authorship. Through this interplay between the handcrafted and the manufactured, the visible and the unseen, the exhibition explores how histories of migration, labor, and power are embedded in everyday materials, revealing the silent forces that shape our interconnected world.

Yeşim Akdeniz (b. 1978 in Izmir) graduated from Art Academy Düsseldorf in 2002. She participated in the De Ateliers residency program in Amsterdam from 2002 to 2004 and received the Kunstverein Bonn/Peter Mertes Stipendium in 2005.

Her work has been exhibited in many institutions including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunstverein Frankfurt, MAK Museum Vienna, Sammlung Philara in Düsseldorf, Kunstverein Bielefeld and Kunsthal Mechelen in Belgium.

Yeşim Akdeniz’s practice engages with Orientalism, gender and queer studies, and cultural appropriation. Primarily focused on painting, her work is infused with symbolic narratives that can be read as signs of cultural production, negotiation and appropriation. Her most recent series of works combine autobiographical elements with (art)- historical narratives that position questions on identity formation along with ascriptions and self-attributions of objects as representations of political structures.

The artist currently lives and works between Brussels and Düsseldorf.