The core of the gallery’s collection are the works of artists from Eastern countries, primarily Turkey and Iran. Today this is a new and very promising area of the domestic art market, which has investment appeal and at the same time may bring many interesting discoveries for collectors. Most of the works carefully selected by the curator and director of SISTEMA GALLERY, Anastasiya Volkova, were purchased at international fairs in Turkey and at Art Basel Hong Kong and are of the highest quality.

Contemporary art has been thriving in the countries of the East in recent decades. The Istanbul Biennial, which has been in existence since 1987, is at the center of attention of the world art community, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 2004, opened a new building just twenty years later, which today successfully displays works by Turkish artists as well as international exhibitions. The art market is also active: every year the Turkish capital hosts the Contemporary Istanbul International Fair, and there are many galleries, some of which are branches of major European art houses.  Since the 2010s, there has been a growing interest in Iranian artists in the European art community, with their works increasingly participating in international fairs and regularly appearing at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. In 2021, the Victoria and Albert Museum in the UK hosted a large-scale project dedicated to Iranian art, including contemporary art. 

The exhibition at SISTEMA GALLERY will feature works by Turkish and Iranian artists who, according to the curators, have great creative potential and are able to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of conceptual research in the region. Some of them work with local cultural contexts, others create their works in line with global trends, while the rest are based on subjective experience.

Iranian artist Sanam Sayeh Afkan applies the “stream of consciousness” approach, which was inspired by the multidimensional narrative structure in twentieth-century postmodern literature by writers such as Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster, Jorge Luis Borges and William Faulkner. The work on each painting begins with mental impressions, deep layers of memories, a selection of random images from magazines and news. The artist constructs continuous labyrinth-like structures out of them, unpredictable but interconnected. In her vivid paintings, vibrant contrasting colors and collage of mismatching images produce an absurd, inverted world. As the artist herself states: “The viewer finds themselves in a labyrinth of familiar and unfamiliar elements, suspended between dreams and reality, searching, trapped in a timelessness, silence and frozen collaged space.”

Turkish artist Çiğdem Aki, born and based in Munich. A participant of Art Basel Hong Kong (2023, 2024), Art Düsseldorf (2024), Art Dubai (2023), Contemporary Istanbul (2021-2023), explores the limits and potential of color, working across the boundaries of figurative art traditions and abstract geometric forms. 

A graduate of the Department of Printmaking at Yildiz Technical University, Sibel Kirik completed her Master’s degree in painting at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 2010. In her works, the artist successfully combines painting and graphic techniques to create dystopian spaces in which figurative imagery is intertwined with abstract flashes of bright colors. Thus, she seeks to depict situations of conflict and change that inevitably occur in conventional space and time.

A participant of numerous international exhibitions, Mesut Öztürk was born in 1989 in Bulgaria, educated in Turkey and now living and working in the Netherlands. Mesut Öztürk’s artistic practice is based on research into architectural elements from different eras, which he reinterprets in concise forms. The artist’s stylistics is inspired by the conceptual architectural designs of the minimalists of the second half of the 20th century, such as Tadao Ando, Aldo Rossi, Peter Zumthor, as well as the legacy of the German Bauhaus school of the 1920s. His sculptures are most often composed of simple geometric elements, and are balanced poetic compositions. 

Born in Istanbul, Ebru Duruman spent her childhood in a conservative environment. However, her further studies in the United States and her life in Europe influenced her artistic style, which is based on sensual experience and liberated expression. The images of Ebru Duruman’s paintings hover between figurative depictions of the female body and abstraction: distorted forms, twisted compositions, interrupted aggressive strokes combined with smooth lines expressing swirls of emotion.