No, Zembla

what to do On suddenly discovering that you Are now a young and vulnerable toad Plump in the middle of a busy road, Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine, Or a book mite in a revived divine.” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire The exhibition draws its title from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where the fictional kingdom of Zembla becomes a stand-in for a lost homeland, a site suspended between memory and invention. In echoing this, No, Zembla explores how identities dislocated by migration, inheritance, and history form not around stable definitions but around gaps, contradictions, and recursions. “The figure,” as participating artist Zehra Öcal writes, “does not simply occupy space but unsettles it—pressing against it, folding it back on itself, and exposing its limits.” Her statement frames the exhibition's wider premise: that displacement is not just a political or biographical condition, but a formal and perceptual one, reorienting how bodies, images, and meanings inhabit space. This is not a show about identity as theme, but identity as method: how to approach the world from a position of dislocation; how to assemble a language through contradiction, mimicry, or displacement; how to live within the uncertainty of cultural multiplicity without demanding coherence. The artists draw from everyday rituals, inherited materials, domestic textures, and performative gestures. Their approaches range from embroidery to fragmented landscape, from graphic play to archival reference—yet what binds them is not medium or origin, but a shared attentiveness to the unstable boundaries of self and place. As the persistent fantasy of authenticity dissolves—whether of nation, culture, or artistic voice—No, Zembla considers how modes of artistic making can remain sensitive to rupture without being overwhelmed by it. These are not works that offer solutions or singular truths. They dwell instead in the indeterminate: in the half-remembered, the mistranslated, the dissonant and unresolved. If the modernist dream once asked painting and installation to build new worlds, then these works suggest something quieter: that it is enough, and perhaps even necessary, to trace the shapes of absence and the textures of return.