PİLEVNELİ presents “The Sanctuary”, by Ersan Mondtag (b.1987, Berlin), will be on view at PİLEVNELİ Dolapdere from 2 June to 4 July 2026.
“The theater of dreams is a place without supervision. In this refuge, memory escapes the control of the day and pours out into the night passages. There, eerie accomplices appear and surprising doors open. Old and new anxieties transform into encrypted images. Time loses its dominion over experience; the journey back into one’s own past becomes child’s play. Everything that once seemed unclear suddenly appears in cruel clarity in the dream image.
But there is always an escape from the stage of mysterious connections, from frightening encounters, always a twist that seems impossible while awake but naturally works in the dream. Even the worst nightmares are so gripping and interesting because they help to decode the threats of reality anew. After awakening and the return into the logic of the day with its demands, reality looks quiet disappointing, even with a racing heartbeat. Yet the echo of questions lingers long as an inner-world oracle.“
-Till Brigleb
Ersan Mondtag’s artistic practice operates at the intersection of visual arts, architecture, and performance, deconstructing personal and collective biographies to translate them into expansive, multimedia installations. Mondtag garnered international acclaim for his contribution to the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. His work was regarded as one of the central highlights of the Biennale, consolidating Mondtag’s reputation for transposing social realities into monumental aesthetic statements.
In his current body of work, ‘Sanctuary’, Mondtag continues his rigorous investigation of traumatic memory spaces. The multimedia installation functions as a system of corresponding individual works, centred around the video piece ‘Mask’. Serving as a primal scene, it recounts the dream-narrative of a childhood desire for revenge, opening a network of interior spaces where the child’s world overlaps with adult perception. Within this psychic architecture of dream-paths, a series of motifs emerges that unfolds across other media without ever repeating.
The dream is preserved within a vintage cathode-ray television, a relic from the era of primal memory. ‘Mask’ consists of surreal sequences of a universally valid traumatic constellation that forms the substance of this nightmare: parents quarrelling violently, a child feeling threatened and disregarded, and a new brother in the crib who claims all love and care—identified in the child’s consciousness as the cause of the family’s upheaval. Through animated scenes that blend motifs from drama, horror films, personal memories, and Mondtag’s own decade-long experience in theatre, the film transforms archetypal fears into a poignant dream journey.
The sculptural centrepiece of this dreamscape features a child standing in a pool of blood, its shores formed from the shattered porcelain of parental disputes. Sleep movements recorded with a night-vision camera during a nightmare are projected onto the crimson surface. Surrounding this sculpture, a series of masks—the ‘dream guides’—form a kind of open witches' circle in their grotesque beauty. The deliberate fragility of these heads, crafted from cardboard and paint, alludes to the fleeting nature of ‘dream-work’, while heavy marble plinths represent the massive weight of memories that tether individuals to the places of their childhood, even when living thousands of miles away.
The installation is expanded by ten paintings depicting dream scenes and a bespoke radio programme featuring poetry by Albert Ostermaier, creating a multi- dimensional narrative. A child recites a poem written specifically for the work, in which the intricate motifs of the installation are once again reflected and transformed through literature. A somber child portrait and nine enigmatic moments of inexplicable occurrences tell their own autonomous stories of the unheimlich (the uncanny).
The DNA of the primal scene is inscribed into every individual work of this vast installation. In this ‘theatre of dreams’, every detail speaks of both the whole and the particular. Within this ‘sanctuary’—a refuge from primal disturbance—an orchestration of hidden forces unfolds piece by piece. It employs the language of the visible to work against the obvious. Each work is a process of encirclement, a reconstruction of that which cannot be reconstructed.
Following ‘Titus Kompleks’ in Istanbul, ‘Sanctuary’ marks Mondtag’s continued engagement with the cultural and psychic architecture between Germany and Turkey. The work is characterised by a high visual density that consistently dissolves the boundaries between the stage and the exhibition space, utilizing the ‘uncanny’ as a means to reconstruct incomprehensible moments.
The second part of the exhibition, ‘Asbestos’, sharpens the focus on the concrete physical body and seamlessly translates the historical discourses of his much- discussed Venice installation into the gallery space. While Mondtag’s ‘Monument to an Unknown Person’ in the German Pavilion featured a three-storey, habitable sculpture as an ‘ark of memory’ to investigate the disappearance of the individual within national narratives of labour migration, ‘Asbestos’ now concentrates on the material evidence of this fate.
The exhibition functions as an in-depth forensic search, translating the biography of his grandfather, Hasan Aygün—a former Gastarbeiter (guest worker) whose life represents a forgotten generation—from the monumental to the private. In the early 1960s, Hasan Aygün was among the four million workers recruited to the FRG to assist in the German ‘Economic Miracle’. He died before reaching retirement from a pulmonary disease contracted while producing asbestos-based building materials. Between these moments of seeking fortune and the tragic death of a body destroyed by a lack of occupational safety lay twenty-eight years of life—both arduous and fulfilled.
A cycle of twenty-eight busts documents the gradual transformation of the face over the years of his working life—a form of representation historically reserved for the distinguished’ men of the bourgeois class. ‘Asbestos’ deepens the perspective on the fate of this forgotten generation who laboured for both their own and Germany’s prosperity. Through numerous new works, the search for traces focuses on the physical body of Hasan Aygün and the subtle, protracted process of arrival, where the foreign land inevitably becomes a second home.
The materiality of ‘Asbestos’ is highly charged. X-rays of the diseased lung are laser-etched into Eternit panels, transforming industrial material into a permanent, materially-laden memory. Mondtag contrasts this ‘panorama of destruction’ with private fragments from the family album. Transposed onto historically significant supports, these records speak of longing, pride, and the process of settling in a foreign land. The installation is accompanied by a three-part orchestral suite by Beni Brachtel and texts by Albert Ostermaier, which condense the theme of ‘dust and breathing’ into a musical and literary requiem.
In opposition to this aesthetics of ‘evil consequences’, snapshots from the family album provide a panorama of a rich life. Alongside moments in the army or references to the state founder Atatürk, these testimonies are, above all, time capsules of warm and loving privacy. These glimpses into a culture of life outside of work suggest that the history of labour migration remains incomplete if it only tells the story of people from the perspective of the victim. It is also a story of relationships, hopes, successes, and moments of happiness that, taken together, generate a justified sense of pride.
These objects and sculptures are embedded within elements of the large-scale installation from the German Pavilion. As individual works, they plastically capture history within the body. The orchestral suite incorporates Hasan Aygün's personal favourite song and concludes with a requiem. Video works that accompanied the performative ritual of ‘resurrection’ in Venice, or document it as an art film, are as much a part of ‘Asbestos’ as the staging of German bureaucratic communication and other documents.
Ultimately, the exhibition at PİLEVNELİ dissolves the boundaries between documentation, fiction, and fine art. Mondtag succeeds in presenting the history of labour migration beyond a pure victim perspective, framing it as a complex narrative of relationships and resilience. Each work acts as a process of encircling a reality that eludes simple reconstruction, solidifying Mondtag’s position as one of the most radical voices in the contemporary exploration of identity and heritage.
You can visit “The Sanctuary” at PİLEVNELİ Dolapdere from 2 June to 4 July 2026, Tuesday to Friday between 10:00 and 17:00, and Saturday between 11:00 and 17:00.
For more information about the artist:
Melih Avcılar
+90 (536) 294 89 49
melihavcilar@pilevneli.com
