Memorial Forests

Memorial Forests (Hatıra Ormanları) is a solo exhibition of paintings by Emre Celali at Labirent Sanat, Çatma Mescit Mah. Tepebaşı Cad. No:56 K:2, Beyoğlu, Istanbul. It runs from 12 September to 17 October 2026 and is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 7pm. The works are landscapes, hung in a range of sizes on dark grey walls. In the gallery's installation view, a row of five small horizontal works hangs beside one large work and one smaller work.

The gallery's exhibition text places the show within a wider question about how people relate to time, place and nature. It starts from the handprint left on a cave wall, which it reads as the earliest physical proof of the wish to reach beyond one's own time. In this account, making is a quiet answer to disappearance.

The landscape in the show is treated as a hybrid ground where nature, people and technology keep meeting and changing one another. Each new intervention reshapes the terrain without wiping out earlier forms, and old and new merge into fresh surfaces. The text says this tension becomes visible through abstracted layers of landscape, which act as a two-way mirror between what has been lived and what is still to come.

Celali was born in 1989 in İzmir, studied painting at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and works from a studio in İzmir. Memorial Forests is his fourth solo exhibition at Labirent Sanat, after Prytaneion in 2022, Doğaya Uygun Yaşamak in 2024 and İnsanın Uyumu in 2025. The gallery also showed his work in the group exhibitions Anemoia and Olay Ufku in 2019.