Gelenek İn Progress

Black Light Gallery welcomes visitors with its inaugural exhibition, Gelenek: In Progress. Taking place between January 17 – February 28, 2026, the exhibition aims to provide a space for reflection on how works produced with traditional techniques can be read within the context of contemporary art.

Bringing together 16 artists—Fatmanur Arslan, Zeynep Akman, Azra Çelik, Çağrı Dizdar, Behice Uçar, Merve Zeybek, Feyza Çoban, Mehmet İşcan, Bengisu Kaya, İsra Doğan, Selçuk Pol, Dilara Altınkepçe Arslan, Şule Güzeller, Gülbahar Gümüşten Çelik, and Damla Moğulkoç—and curated by Hale Albayrak, Gelenek: In Progress questions the possibility of a "completed" or "pure" idea of tradition, treating traditional arts as a living practice constantly reshaped within historical, cultural, and social conditions.

Traditional arts are often coded as a field of production fixed in the past and silent about the present, due to the social and political meanings attributed to the concept of "traditional." This perception stems from the Eurocentric narrative of art history, which positions Eastern traditional arts as historical relics or Orientalist stops rather than styles or modes of expression. This worldview, rooted in Greco-Latin culture, Renaissance aesthetics, and Enlightenment thought, defines artistic value through criteria it sets itself. Consequently, attempting to grasp Eastern traditional arts through an aesthetic terminology shaped around Western philosophy creates an inevitable gap between concepts and phenomena.

Therefore, the conscious rejection of central perspective in the Eastern miniature tradition, the equating of weaving with craft and its exclusion from the field of art, or the dismissal of calligraphy due to its use of a writing system other than the Latin alphabet are all results of the "universal" assumptions presented by the Eurocentric art history narrative regarding composition, perspective, material, and modes of representation. This approach, on one hand, renders traditional arts inherent to the past and invisible through modernist ideology. On the other hand, the stance taken to resist this approach limits traditional arts to classical styles and themes through an ambiguous and normative understanding of "preservation."

Moving from this point, Gelenek: In Progress develops an objection to the common belief that works produced with traditional methods cannot express the contemporary. It demonstrates that traditional arts can contain not only formal but also conceptual and critical layers, offering powerful modes of expression that can relate to contemporary experiences, current questions, and existing social contexts. Instead of merely "responding" to today's questions and problematics with these techniques, or harboring an intention to preserve them as they are or a nostalgic longing for the past, the exhibition explores what becomes possible by thinking about and constructing the present through these modes of expression.