The Best Pose is Given in Solitude

The Baksı Museum in Bayburt is showing photographs by Zeki Demirkubuz from 9 September to 30 October 2026. The solo exhibition is titled The Best Pose is Given in Solitude (Hayatta ve Fotoğrafta En İyi Pozu Yalnızlar Verir). Art On İstanbul brings the show to the museum as a touring exhibition. Framed colour prints hang on grey walls under the curved vaults of the museum's roof. Demirkubuz took the pictures in cities and their surroundings in Europe, America and Asia.

Born in Isparta in 1964, Demirkubuz is best known as a film director. He made his first feature, C Blok, in 1994. Masumiyet (1997) was shown at the Venice Film Festival. Yazgı and İtiraf, both made in 2001, screened in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2002. His latest film is Hayat (2023). His films have had retrospectives at the Viennale, the Toronto International Film Festival and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The photographs record ordinary moments as he met them, with nothing staged and no story to follow. Each frame is built from people, places, empty space and light, and silence gives the scenes their weight. Light and reflections return from picture to picture. In some prints time seems to stand still, while in others a reflection sets the stillness moving again. Solitude appears here as a subject and also as a way of looking at the world.

The exhibition opened first at Art On İstanbul in Piyalepaşa, Istanbul, from 20 September to 18 October 2025, with Ebru Yılmaz as curator. The prints carry the watchful, inward attention of his films into a sparer way of seeing. Observation, silence and spontaneity are the terms the organisers use for the selection. The museum is open from 9am to 12.30pm and 1.30pm to 6pm, and entry is 200 TL, or 70 TL for students.