The Promises of Monsters

The Promises of Monsters (Canavarların Vaatleri) is a group exhibition of ten artists at Hara in Sarıyer, Istanbul, open from 1 March 2026 to 28 February 2027. Curated by Ezgi Hamzaçebi, it brings together sculpture, installation, photography and video, much of it made for the show. Its subject is the body, human or otherwise, along with the ways of living that society has labelled monstrous.

The artists are A. Serkan Aka, Canavar, Hilal Polat, İrem Aydın, Lara Ögel, Ömer Tevfik Erten, Seçil Epik, Şafak Şule Kemancı, Yaşam Şaşmazer and Zeynep Kılınç. Rather than fixing bodies and identities in set categories, the exhibition treats them as unsettled states held on a threshold. Lines drawn between the living and the inert, the made and the grown, the useful and the thrown away keep shifting. Flaws, mutation, hybrid forms and darkness are read as signs of resistance and of other possible lives, not as faults.

Several works take the body apart and put it back together. Yaşam Şaşmazer's Udagan (2026) coils wisteria trunks over a wooden ladder, joined by a prosthetic leg, bandages, gauze, moss and soil. Its title is a Mongolian term for female shamans, figures linked with shapeshifting. A. Serkan Aka builds sound installations from scrap, and Ömer Tevfik Erten works with digital noise. Canavar contributes Hard-to-Love Flowers, while Seçil Epik and İrem Aydın present a speculative documentary on how myths decide who counts as monstrous.

On the top floor, a Monster Library made with Frankeştayn Bookstore gathers fiction and non-fiction that fed into the exhibition. Visitors can suggest more titles in a Monster Notebook. The library also holds a book by Merve Mehmet made from distorted scans of the artist's body. Free guided tours of about 45 minutes run every Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 5pm for ticket holders aged 12 and over.