Review by Elâ Atakan
The Waves
Curated by: Nesli Gül
Gamze Öztürk, Anouk Kruithof
Lana Mesić, Mesut Öztürk
17 January – 1 March 2026
Contour Gallery
Josephstraat 164
3014 TX Rotterdam
The group exhibition The Waves opened on January 17 at Contour Gallery in Rotterdam, curated by Nesli Gül. It approaches identity not as a fixed form of belonging, but as a fluid and permeable state of becoming. The exhibition draws its inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same title. In Woolf’s text, each character carries a distinct voice and narrative; yet all grow up on the shore of the same sea, shaped by the rhythm of the same water. Similarly, the artists brought together in this exhibition converge within a shared current, departing from different stories and materials.
In the exhibition, materials shift and transform in unexpected ways. A carpet is woven not from thread, but from human hair cut from the body. Archival images are built out of matches, carrying within them the latent possibility of ignition and conflict. The body, plant life, and technology seep into one another, blurring their boundaries. Ceramic, a material that does not bend without breaking, is forced into precarious balance, held together by clamps and constantly on the verge of collapse.
These material transformations mirror the artists’ own experiences of displacement and shifting identity. The place of birth, the nation one belongs to, the geographies one moves through all remain in flux. Identity, like material, must be constructed again. As in Woolf’s sea, boundaries here are unstable; each wave belongs to the same body of water, yet moves in its own direction.
Gamze Öztürk, Hands-on-Hips, 2023–ongoing, Synthetic and human hair mix. Installation and performance
Anouk Kruithof, I Identify As, 2024, Single-channel video installation, 10:54 min
Photography: Hasan Özgür Top
Gamze Öztürk’s performance and installation Hands-on-Hips opens one of the most direct spaces in The Waves where the boundaries of material and identity are pushed to their limits. Referencing the tradition of Anatolian carpets and kilims, the work replaces thread, the primary material of weaving, with human hair. A fragment of the body becomes both the medium of production and the surface that carries meaning. Woven live during the performance, this hair carpet activates layered cultural codes. In Anatolian kilims, each motif carries symbolic traces of a period, an experience, or a desire in the life of the woman who weaves it. Within this context, the hands-on-hips motif can be read as a powerful sign referring to bodily posture and social positioning in Anatolian culture. Similarly, hair in Anatolia is not merely a biological element; it carries dense meanings related to marital status, social position, and identity. Forms such as single or double braids allow for cultural readings associated with marriage and desire.
For thousands of years, weaving, traditionally practiced by women, has sustained a continuity from birth to death, producing objects that wrap, protect, and carry memory, including garments, bedding, tablecloths, and the surfaces that shape everyday life. In this work, Gamze Öztürk brings together a part of her own body and the female body with a cultural representation already charged with social meaning. In doing so, she approaches tradition not as a fixed inheritance but as a field that can be reread and transformed. Hands-on-Hips ultimately turns the body into both the one who weaves and the one that is woven.
Anouk Kruithof, I Identify As, 2024, Single-channel video installation, 10:54 min
Photography: Hasan Özgür Top
Anouk Kruithof’s video work I Identify as focuses on the dissolution of boundaries between body, identity, and species, making visible the permeable relationships between humans, nature, and technology within The Waves. Footage recorded by the artist in the Amazon interweaves with visual streams collected from the internet and AI-assisted interventions; the human body slowly transforms into vegetal textures. The fluidity of the images disrupts bodily integrity, displacing identity from the position of a fixed subject. The Amazon imagery in the work critically addresses the exoticizing and romanticizing gaze directed toward communities often coded as “primitive” or “closer to nature.” In doing so, it questions the hierarchical relationship modern humanity establishes with the natural world. This approach reveals how the Enlightenment and evolutionary distinctions that place the human at the center have become increasingly untenable today.
Positioning herself close to the notion of the Plant(O)scene, Kruithof disassembles the understanding that situates the human as separate from and superior to nature. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as an opposing force to the natural, she employs it as an interface that intensifies the permeability of images and bodies. I Identify as invites us to think of the human not merely as a bodily entity, but as part of an ecological, technological, and interspecies network of relations.
Lana Mesić, When You Point a Finger, Three Are Pointing Back, 2021–2024, Perforated MDF board, matches, metal wire
Photography: Hasan Özgür Top
Lana Mesić’s installation When You Point a Finger, Three Are Pointing Back approaches memory in The Waves not as a stable and secure narrative, but as a fragile structure that carries the potential for ignition at any moment. Constructed from matches and matchsticks, the images reveal how easily narratives of nationalism, masculinity, and war can flare up, while not merely representing this danger but materially containing it. As the artist describes in her text, “the matches lighting one by one like tiny estafette runners,”* fire does not erupt all at once; it is passed from hand to hand, and history catches fire in succession. This transmission continues not only in images but in bodies. In the text accompanying her artworks, Lana Mesić explains that during the Yugoslav period, children in schools followed a subject called Protection and Social Self-Defence, where they were taught to put on gas masks, treat the wounded, prepare explosives, throw bombs, and handle and shoot the M48 rifle. Reflecting on this militarized education, she turns to her mother and asks whether traces of this schooling might still remain within her. The artist’s question, “What of this schooling might still be stored in her body?”*, shifts the locus of memory from the archive to the body, suggesting that memory persists not only in documents but in muscle memory, reflexes, and gestures.
Extending toward the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the figure of Tito, and the symbolic ties between football and war, the work makes visible how collective identity was constructed through discipline, masculinity, and sacrifice. As the artist states, “Tito was the almighty lid to the pressure cooker that was Yugoslavia,”* and once that lid was lifted, suppressed tensions erupted uncontrollably.
Mesut Öztürk, United 1 and 3, 2024, Ceramic and metal, 109 × 44 × 46 cm
Gamze Öztürk, Hands-on-Hips, 2023–ongoing, Synthetic and human hair mix. Installation and performance
Photography: Hasan Özgür Top
Mesut Öztürk’s ceramic series United opens one of the most restrained yet tension-filled spaces within The Waves, where the limits of material are subtly but persistently tested. Although ceramic is, by nature, a rigid material that allows no return once broken, Öztürk does not conceal this fragility but instead renders it visible. Fragmented forms are held together by metal clips, establishing an improbable balance. This balance does not promise seamless unity; rather, it suggests a provisional continuity, one that remains contingent, negotiated, and perpetually on the verge of dissolution. The aesthetic coherence of the works almost conceals the structural strain they embody, yet the presence of the clips reveals the tension operating beneath their composed surfaces. The work evokes the early twentieth century, a period marked by the acceleration of national identity formations, forced migrations, and population exchanges, during which individuals were displaced from their places of belonging and resettled in unfamiliar geographies. Much like the “ideal citizen” identities constructed during that era, the fragments in United are bound together through external, coercive, and often mythic narratives. The clamps here become material counterparts to regimes of belonging that can never be fully internalized by the individuals they attempt to bind.
Öztürk’s lack of a fixed studio during the production of these works establishes a conscious tension with the material’s demand for stability. Displacement, temporality, and instability are not merely thematic concerns but integral to the production process itself. In this sense, United approaches identity not as a completed structure but as a precarious formation held together by force, always at risk of collapse, and requiring continuous recalibration.
Mesut Öztürk, United 1 and 3, 2024, Ceramic and metal, 109 × 44 × 46 cm
Photography: Hasan Özgür Top
Rather than a shared origin or a singular identity, what binds the four practices in this exhibition is a shared condition of movement. Gamze Öztürk, Anouk Kruithof, Lana Mesić, and Mesut Öztürk were born in different geographies and shaped by different political contexts; today, they continue their work elsewhere, under changing conditions.
Curated by Nesli Gül, the exhibition frames this condition of movement as its central question. Born in Istanbul and now based in Amsterdam, Gül approaches identity not as fixed but as something shaped through relocation and transition. The works reflect this logic of transition: hair becomes carpet, the body becomes vegetal, the archive becomes combustible, ceramic becomes a fragile balance. Identity, too, shifts from fixed belonging to ongoing reconstruction. As in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, separate trajectories move within the same current. At this shifting shoreline, the exhibition reveals identity itself as unstable ground.
* All quoted passages in this article are taken from Lana Mesić’s When You Point a Finger, Three Are Pointing Back (Rotterdam: The Eriskay Connection, 2024).