Art On İstanbul will welcome audiences with Kerem Giriş’s solo exhibition, “Kaldırım Mühendisi”, at its Polat Piyalepaşa venue on Wednesday, April 8, 2026. The exhibition will run until May 23, 2026.
“Kaldırım Mühendisi” approaches the city not as a landscape, but as a functioning mechanism. The figures, objects, and structures in the exhibition reveal how public space is dismantled, closed off, reassigned, and what residue is left behind. The bodies depicted here are not in motion; they are paused, put on hold, and suspended.
The exhibition focuses on the everyday operations of the public realm: ordinary urban forms such as sitting, waiting, passing through, and transporting are stripped of their functions and transformed into objects of inventory, evidence, threshold, and procedure. Works like Bench, Allocation Cart, and Castle reveal how the city is divided, how access is regulated, and how shared spaces are continually recoded. With “Kaldırım Mühendisi”, the artist turns away from the city’s aesthetics and instead examines its mechanisms, inviting a reading of the urban environment through its operations rather than its surfaces.
Kerem Giriş (b. 1991) is an Istanbul-based artist whose work investigates the unseen weight, memory, and fragility of urban life through installations and figurative imagery. Working with materials such as glass, cardboard, and iron, as well as paintings on canvas and paper, he focuses on thresholds where silence, absence, and impermanence intersect with the body. His figures are often incomplete; faces and bodies remain unfinished, their gazes direct yet their narratives concealed, representing both personal and collective repression. Through these moments, Giriş aims to make the unheard visible and to reveal traces of memory embedded in space and material. He studied Visual Communication Design and Visual Arts at Işık University (2013–2017) and has continued his practice since 2018 in Graphic Design at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.
