Gökçen Dilek Acay’s embroidered works provoke, amuse, and unsettle. They maintain a boldness and irreverence while striking at the heart of the political and social realities with both wit and precision.
As one enters the gallery, the room is populated by embroidered linen stretched over canvas frames alongside freely suspended textile works alongside a series of tapestries hung on the walls. These pieces are often inhabited by various creatures assuming traditional human roles, becoming contemporary fables populated by anthropomorphic beings. This act perversely somehow humanises the protagonists, revealing their arrogance, vulnerability, and absurdity, exposing structures of power, social mechanisms, and the contradictions of human behaviour. Their existence within a world that seems increasingly out of balance is revealed.
Occasional short English phrases accompany the figures often indirectly addressing the state of our times, while the additional stitching work exemplifies the reality of the climate crisis and the gradual encroachment of authoritarianism. Image and language work in sync with one another, delivering a witty punchline, sometimes a merciless indictment.
Acay's choice of embroidery, a medium deeply rooted in tradition, is not a contradiction but an integral part of her artistic strategy. Her continued use of rugs, embroidery, and tapestry is partly informed by their prevalence within Turkish culture. Through a considered use of technique, she transforms a craft historically associated with decoration and domesticity into a vehicle of resistance. The slow, meticulous process of stitching stands in striking contrast to the urgency of the issues she addresses, sharpening rather than softening the gravity of her message.
Acay's works are as entertaining as they are unsettling, possessing a disarming lightness, playfully exposing the absurdities of contemporary life and power structures. They invite laughter, only to reveal an underlying absurdity that, in the next moment, confronts us with our own reality. Moving between fable and reality, satire and protest, she has developed a visual language that is both poetic and uncompromising, drawing its power from an acute observation of the world we inhabit today.
The atmosphere shifts in the rear of the gallery, where the series Free Fall unfolds as a site-specific installation of individually suspended batik textiles, created using Shibori, a traditional Japanese wax-resist dyeing technique. Floating freely through the space, the indigo-dyed fabrics depict silhouetted bodies caught in moments of falling, suspension, defence, confrontation, and stillness.
In contrast to the more confrontational visual rhetoric of the embroidered works, Free Fall opens up a quieter, more contemplative space. The works explore vulnerability, movement, and the body's relationship to its surroundings. The suspended textiles becoming cartographic traces of our most intimate geography, that of the body itself. Each body carrying within it personal experience, history, and the imprint of social structures. Hovering somewhere between support and loss of control, the installation becomes both a poetic and deeply existential metaphor for the uncertainties of the present.
Gökcen Dilek Acay (b. 1983, Istanbul, Turkey) lives and works in Germany. She initially studied music, graduating from the Yildiz Technical University Music Department in Istanbul in 2009, before switching to fine arts and earning a Diplom in Freie Kunst and Media Art from the Bauhaus Universität Weimar in 2016. Gallery and institutional solo exhibitions include shows at ACC Gallery Weimar, DE (2025); Altes Dampfbad, Baden Baden, DE (2024); Eigenheim Gallery, Weimar, DE (2023, 2021, 2020); Kunstforum Gotha, DE (2022); NRVK, Ravensburg, DE (2018); and Nev Galerie, Istanbul, TR (2016). Acay’s work has been exhibited at group exhibitions in galleries and institutions such as Baden Baden Stadt Museum, DE (2024); Kunstfest Weimar / Jenaer Kunstverein, DE (2023); Arter Gallery, Istanbul, TR (2023, 2019); The Watermill Center, New York, US (2022); Kunsthalle Erfurt, DE (2022); and Gallery Nev, Istanbul, TR (2023, 2021). In 2024, she received the Thüringer Landesstipendien for Visual Arts, having previously been awarded the Freistaats Thüringen Landesstipendium für Bildende Kunst in 2021. Acay has also participated in numerous international residencies, including the Shangyuan Art Museum, CN (2024) with support from IFA, the Baldreit Stipendium, Baden Baden, DE (2023/2024), and the Tra/Travel Artist Residency, Osaka, JP (2022) supported by the SAHA Foundation Turkey.