Winter in the Gecekondu

Galeri Soyut presents Gecekonduda Kış (Winter in the Gecekondu), a solo exhibition by the painter Hamdi Eser, from 30 October to 11 November 2026. The show fills Room B of the gallery's Çankaya space in Ankara with 32 oil paintings on canvas. They picture gecekondu districts, the self-built hillside neighbourhoods at the edge of the city, deep in winter snow. The opening is on 30 October from 6pm to 8pm, and entry is free.

All the paintings are untitled, and all but one were made in 2026, at sizes from 30 by 30 cm up to 110 by 110 cm. The largest, from 2024, sets a line of yellow taxis and blue minibuses along a wet road at the foot of the canvas. Above them, houses with orange, blue and green fronts climb a steep slope under snow, closed off on the right by a wall of rock. A 100 by 100 cm canvas from 2026 looks down from a height on winding roads, crowded white roofs and leafless branches.

One work of the same size uses a round canvas, where rows of houses curl in a spiral through blue-tinged snow among stands of red trees. Another, at 90 by 90 cm, follows red buses and yellow minibuses up a hillside road past smoking chimneys. In his statement for the show, Eser says he has no wish to romanticise these districts or turn them into nostalgic scenery. He reads them as records of migration, urban growth, class division and shared memory, where winter makes warmth and shelter urgent and neighbours depend on one another.

Hamdi Eser was born in 1970 in Akdağmadeni, in Yozgat province, and went to school in Ankara. He studied painting in the art education department of Gazi University's Gazi Faculty of Education from 1991 to 1994. He has taught art in Suruç and Bala, and since 2010 at Çankaya Başkent Halk Eğitimi Merkezi. His earlier solo shows include Doku Sanat Galerisi in Istanbul in 2025 and Galeri Kambur in Istanbul and Artsan Sanat Galerisi in Ankara in 2024. The gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 7pm.