I Was a Stranger Here

I Was a Stranger Here (Ben Buranın Yabancısıydım) is a solo exhibition by Ramazan Can at Anna Laudel Ankara, on view from 18 September to 21 November 2026. Can, born in Manisa in 1988 and based in Ankara, shows works made from carpets, concrete and neon. Installation views show a carpet tufted with the words "Where is my place in this world?". Nearby, a carpet breaks into jigsaw pieces across a wall, and rolled carpets pass through a concrete column.

The carpet is where the show begins. The gallery's text sets aside its role as ornament or flat pattern and reads it as an object that holds the marks of migration, of making and of shared memory. The text turns to the Yörük, a nomadic people of Anatolia. When Yörük families settled, the change reached beyond where they lived to how they produced goods, how they worked and how they organised life together.

The works come out of the artist's research in and around Manisa, where he was born, into the passage from a nomadic life to a settled one. By joining carpet and concrete, the works put movement and settlement in dialogue. The exhibition does not set the two against each other. It asks instead how each material alters what the other means once they are joined in a single object.

Two further questions run through the show: what happens to an object when it is brought into an art context, and how a sense of belonging is built. In 2025 Can held solo exhibitions at the Gustav-Lübcke-Museum in Hamm and at Villa Merkel in Esslingen, both in Germany. The Ankara gallery opens Tuesday to Saturday, 12pm to 7pm, and on Sunday by appointment. Entry is free.