PİLEVNELİ presents “Pussies and Places”, the first solo exhibition in Türkiye by Ryan Gander, will be on view at PİLEVNELİ Dolapdere from 6 November to 6 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
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 6 November to 6 December 2025, Tuesday to Friday between 10:00 and 17:00, and Saturday between 11:00 and 17:00.
