Modules for the UNKNOWN Student Monument
Erdoğan Zümrütoğlu
Surp Yerrortutyun Armenian Catholic Church
Istiklal Street, Perukar Alley (next to Odakule), No:14, Beyoğlu / Istanbul
September 16 – November 15, 2025 | Visiting Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00 to 19:00 (Closed on Mondays)
From September 16 to November 15, 2025, PİLEVNELİ presents Erdoğan Zümrütoğlu’s new solo exhibition Modules for the UNKNOWN Student Monument at the Surp Yerrortutyun Armenian Catholic Church! This collaboration marks a renewed encounter between the gallery and the artist, unfolding during the 18th Istanbul Biennial.
Bringing together Zümrütoğlu’s paintings and sculptures from past years, the exhibition offers both a visual response and an homage to Ece Ayhan’s 1970 poem Meçhul Öğrenci Anıtı (Unknown Student Monument). Ayhan wrote the poem in memory of Battal Mehetoğlu, a university student killed during the political unrest in Istanbul in 1969.
Rather than a literal reference, the works resonate with the emotional and political density that permeates Ayhan’s poetic language. They open a space for a shared sensibility that reflects on contemporary crises, sociopolitical breakdowns, and the ongoing threats to human dignity. Zümrütoğlu’s work does not offer refuge; it confronts. The viewer is invited into an unflinching terrain where rage, grief, loss, and helplessness may surface alongside a cathartic confrontation with buried traumas and unspoken violence.
The word “modules” in the title might suggest precision, systems, or measurement, but the world of these paintings resists containment. There is no lesson being taught here, no ideology being pushed. What Zümrütoğlu crafts is a form of sharpness rooted not in fixed aesthetic style but in a mobility between visual languages. He refuses to be defined by a single mode, instead bending, merging, and dismantling formal expectations to build a visual language that is dissonant yet deeply intentional.
With Modules for the UNKNOWN Student Monument, Zümrütoğlu proposes an alternative model to the classical idea of the monument. It is destructive and constructive at once, material yet elusive. The visual field becomes a site of both loss and presence, a space for mourning and for reimagining. This approach is deeply present in the works themselves, where the tension between figuration and materiality becomes the core of Zümrütoğlu’s practice. His canvases wrestle with the push and pull between figure and surface, with marks and interventions both direct and residual shaping their physicality.
Similar concerns can be traced in the practices of artists like Gerhard Richter and Robert Ryman, where representation gives way to presence and the image becomes an object in its own right. Zümrütoğlu’s affinity with the tradition of deformation emerges clearly. Figures are not stable forms but mutable, dissolving, and re-emerging entities. Some vanish under layers of paint, others assert themselves briefly before fading. Fragmentation here is not only an aesthetic condition but also a question about the limits of representation and the fragility of identity.
The exhibition gains further depth through its setting at the Surp Yerrortutyun Armenian Catholic Church in Odakule. Zümrütoğlu’s introspective and deeply personal works, not rooted in religious iconography or historical narrative, take on new resonance in this collective and spiritual space. The church, with its origins in the 16th century and its 19th century reconstruction led by Garabet Balyan, is more than a religious building. It is a cultural node, a place of transition between East and West, between memory and material. Within this architectural and historical context, the artist’s personal imagery finds a broader voice. Silence and solitude in the paintings are echoed and expanded into the space, where the individual merges with the communal and interiority meets history.
Erdoğan Zümrütoğlu’s exhibition Modules for the UNKNOWN Student Monument can be visited from September 16 to November 15, 2025, Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00–19:00, at the Surp Yerrortutyun Armenian Catholic Church in Odakule.
Modules for the UNKNOWN Student Monument is carried out with the support of TEPTA.
