November 12 – December 31, 2025
PİLEVNELİ | DOLAPDERE
PİLEVNELİ presents “Pussies and Places”, the first solo exhibition in Türkiye by Ryan Gander (b.1976,Chester, England), will be on view at PİLEVNELİ Dolapdere from 12 November to 31 December 2025.
“Pussies and Places” focuses on a large installation incorporating an animatronic sculpture of a storytelling magpie alongside marble sculptures of stray cats and paintings reiterating place names. These new lines of investigation direct us to themes of public vs. private; collectivity vs. singularity; the foreign and the familiar — subtly modifying the audience’s behaviour, questioning the sense of place and belonging, whilst testing our fondness of the everyday and natural signs.
“Sometimes I have to remind myself that I should be just as fascinated with the things I encounter in the world outside of the gallery, as the things I experience inside of the gallery. The world is an amazing place, full of signs and symbols. If only we allow ourselves to look. Why do we humans look harder, explore further and investigate to greater depths the things we are confronted by inside the white walls of a gallery, than the things we encounter outside of it, in the everyday world in which we all live? Attention is one of our greatest liberties and how we choose to spend it should be considered one of our greatest assets. In this era of Attention Economy, I am increasingly sceptical of things that shout or demand me to look and increasingly interested in the things I find for myself, seemingly by accident.
The perfect artwork for me is constructed by a balance between disclosing enough information for the viewer to be interested and resisting the ability to provide so much information, making the artwork become didactic, resulting in it only being able to be read in one singular way. It’s a fine line. I like art that I don’t fully understand, which makes me ask questions to which there are no, or perhaps many different answers. I like to feel like Sherlock Holmes, looking for clues, and questioning their significance and their position in the world of all animist objects. A kind of informal amateur study of the hierarchies of all visual languages.”
— RYAN GANDER
Walking into the gallery space, the installation The Magpie’s Tale (Life’s a bite) (2025), takes over the main ground floor space. Turning the space into a working office with a low suspended ceiling, it becomes a response to site and place – both architecturally and conceptually – yet it also points beyond the confines of the gallery to speak pervasively of contemporary anxieties regarding our existence.
Sections of a suspended office are removed to reveal pockets of natural light pooling in an otherwise dimly-lit space, suggesting a former presence of corporate activity, recalling a sense of busyness and aspiration from yesteryear, yet together with the tedium so often associated with generic office interiors the world over. In one corner, you spot a magpie speaking an old fable written by Ryan Gander… Although now an outmoded and forlorn form of narration, the text offers poignant commentary on our current existence, operating as a cautionary tale.
Occupying the gallery spaces, audiences meet a variety of life-size marble sculptures of cats, leading you to areas of the gallery you wouldn’t normally explore. Collectively titled Public / Private (2025), half the cats are in a state of rest, whilst the other half are in a state of exploration. Each cat appears somewhat different, but they are all approximately the same size and build, meaning they could be mistaken for the same cat at different moments in time. Their appearance is cute and attractive, yet have an air of a dishevelled street or alley cat; slightly malnourished, a vagrant. The material of the cats is black Marquina marble, otherwise known as Alexander Black, a clean black marble with natural white marbling; the works are produced in the Apuan Alps in Tuscany, Italy, famous for their white Carrara marble quarries.
On the walls, a series of unique paintings fill the space, recounting a place name relating to a significant memory or subjective projection of the artist, the works act as signifiers or stand in for traditional landscape painting, rendering a different image or idea of place in the minds and memories of each and every visitor, a sort of “choose your own adventure” auto-projection of landscape painting if you will. Inspired by an index slide originally used as a title frame in a slide show carousel created by the artist's father sometime in the 1960s, they are commonly exhibited in different places than stated in the painting. Within the collection, some slides appear bright and colourful, in fact, being where the film has cracked or light has distorted, highlighting the beauty in the mistakes or the imperfect.
The one work visitors may miss is an artwork synonymous with Ryan’s practise, titled Everything is Gifted (2025) — an animatronic sculpture of a tiny mosquito randomly twitching as if about to die, positioned on a selection of the artist’s monographs. Placed among catalogues and daily mail, this work highlights the insignificant.
You can visit “Pussies and Places”, an exhibition that explores the overlooked details of everyday life and encourages viewers to create their own narratives, at PİLEVNELİ Dolapdere from 12 November to 31 December 2025, Tuesday to Friday between 10:00 and 17:00, and Saturday between 11:00 and 17:00.
Pussies and Places is organized with the support of Jotun, KEF Hifilife, Uludağ Premium, and Atelier Rebul.
For more information about the artist:
Melih Avcılar
+90 (536) 294 89 49
melihavcilar@pilevneli.com
For press inquiries:
Hale Albayrak
+90 505 552 79 45
halealbayrk@gmail.com
