Rû Bi Rû

Rû Bi Rû is a solo exhibition by Fatoş İrwen at Zilberman Istanbul, İstiklal Cad. No:163 Mısır Apartmanı, Beyoğlu, from 15 September to 21 November 2026. The show combines framed works on paper, hung on dark walls, with a room-scale installation of dried thorny plants set over gravel and a traced riverbed.

The title is Kurdish and means "face to face". İrwen uses it to frame confrontation as an act of standing before something that has been denied. Her subjects are realities that were suppressed, never recorded and handed down by word of mouth. She does not turn these stories into images of testimony. She makes new traces from lived experience and inherited narratives, so that the viewer is placed as a witness.

The exhibition is set in the landscape where İrwen was born and raised. Objects here are treated as forms of resistance rather than leftovers of the past. A strand of hair cut from the body appears beside a dried riverbed ringed with thorns. A city skyline grows over with plants and is cut through by shafts of light. A line follows a riverbed through the middle of the space, hiding and exposing traces as the water moves.

The show also revisits the apocalypse that framed her 2023 solo exhibition Sûr at Zilberman Berlin. There the call of Israfil ends the world. In Rû Bi Rû the Day of Judgment gathers the living and the dead, humans and non-humans, in one place where they meet face to face. In August 2026 İstanbul Modern acquired İrwen's work Rosa for its permanent collection. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 7pm, and the opening took place on 15 September from 6pm to 8pm.