Official Balance by Selim Birsel will be on view at Öktem Aykut from September 15th through October 25th, 2025. The opening reception will take place on Monday, September 15th, from 3 until 8 p.m.
Official Balance, Birsel’s third one-person exhibition at Öktem Aykut, brings together artist’s conceptual language engaging with the political and the public, and his focus on the personal and the singular. For the artist, “official balance” carries irony from the start: every official, hence artificial, force is bound to unsettle the balance of nature, then reappears as the mere assurance for the continuity it has already undermined.
Selim Birsel’s ouevre involves both large-scale site-specific installations carrying historical and political references and visual records of frail yet critical moments in the form of paintings, drawings, and photographs. With Official Balance, Birsel articulates both his ongoing inquiry into the concepts that have formed the foundation of his work since the 1990s and the autobiographical insights that have carried increasing weight since the 2000s, allowing them to resonate with one another.
The exhibition is defined by two large installations spread throughout the gallery space. The first, Official Balance, which also gives the exhibition
its title, presents the gallery’s broad, isolated walls painted to resemble government offices, though marked by a subtle “imbalance.” Parcel / Marcel, spreading across the gallery floor, is a new and more extensive iteration of a work Birsel previously exhibited in 2017 in the group show Tu m’arcel at Ariel Sanat. In Birsel’s work, this installation, using skewers and shank bones —objects he has employed before— demonstrates an impactful criticality, functioning simultaneously as architectural, musical, and poetic elements.
its title, presents the gallery’s broad, isolated walls painted to resemble government offices, though marked by a subtle “imbalance.” Parcel / Marcel, spreading across the gallery floor, is a new and more extensive iteration of a work Birsel previously exhibited in 2017 in the group show Tu m’arcel at Ariel Sanat. In Birsel’s work, this installation, using skewers and shank bones —objects he has employed before— demonstrates an impactful criticality, functioning simultaneously as architectural, musical, and poetic elements.
Accompanying these two installations are the two most recent large-scale landscape paintings Birsel has come to make over the past decade using Iranian ink. The series of paintings subtitled as Don’t You See Something Is Coming? belongs to a body of work that has gained increasing significance in Birsel’s later practice, serving as a medium through which he intensely conveys his subjective sentimentality.
Birsel, who has been living and working for nearly ten years in both Istanbul and the village of Volissos on Chios, includes in Official Balance a small selection of photographs he took in Chios during the summer of 2025. Volissos, Chios, and the entire historic Ionian region represent both a geography where Birsel feels a sense of belonging and the most profound starting points for his artistic practice. The wildfires that broke out in Chios, particularly in Volissos, during the summer of 2025 and caused extensive damage add a personal layer to Official Balance through Birsel’s photographic records.
In addition to Official Balance, Öktem Aykut will present in October the film A Walk with Selim Birsel in Chios, created in collaboration with Selim Birsel and directed by Can Eskinazi. Building on his previous exhibition Seasonless, this film follows Birsel in both Istanbul and Volissos, and is Öktem Aykut’s second film production. Following in the footsteps of Eskinazi’s previous film A Name and a Place, which examines Renée Levi’s exhibitions and her autobiographical connections with Istanbul, A Walk with Selim Birsel in Chios brings attention to the unseen labor inherent in the creative artistic process.
Selim Birsel
Official Balance
September 15 – October 25, 2025
