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Upcoming Exhibition / Gelecek Sergi
26 February - 19 March , 2026
26 Subat - 19 Mart, 2026
Link to the Catalogue
Annette Louise Solakoglu
Işık Güner
Yunus Karma
Elena Tash
Rooted: The Garden Within
Rooted: The Garden Within considers the subconscious bond between human beings and the natural world, an intimacy formed long before language and carried quietly within us throughout our lives. Embedded in the human condition is a sensitivity to beauty, belonging and longing, a pull towards fulfillment, prosperity of spirit, and a sense of the higher self. These sensations are often most vividly encountered in nature, where perception sharpens and the inner world finds resonance.
The memory of a garden walked through in childhood, the languid hour of a summer sunset spent al fresco, or the stillness following a heavy rain when droplets gather on leaves and the fresh scent of nature fills both lungs and spirit are moments in which the natural world disarms us.
Scent, light and greenery converge to produce a heightened awareness, a quiet clarity, a sense of ease. Such experiences do not merely accompany our lives; they shape them, reminding us of something essential and enduring.
Rooted: The Garden Within moves away from the familiar discourse of sustainability or environmental protection to centre on a more intimate truth: that we cannot exist without nature, not only materially but emotionally and psychologically. Nature is our oldest and most constant companion, a refuge for both mind and body, and an ever-present mirror of our inner states.
Through a considered selection of works, the exhibition invites a renewal of this bond. Annette Louise Solakoğlu participates with photographs centred on Istanbul Gardens alongside works from her Botanica series. Drawing on the compositional discipline of Dutch Golden Age painting, Botanica engages with memento mori through scanography, constructing images that negotiate fragility and permanence. Rather than relying on the camera’s conventional optics, Solakoğlu positions each specimen directly on the scanning plane, producing layered compositions marked by translucency, density and tonal precision.
Istanbul Gardens reflects on cultivated spaces within a city shaped by continual transformation. Alternating between muted colour and black and white, the series holds architectural, vegetal and atmospheric elements in suspension, allowing gardens to function as sites where memory and lived experience intersect.
Alongside these works, Işık Güner’s contribution can be read as a visual chronicle of a devoted observer of the natural world. Rooted in direct field research and sustained engagement with plant life, her practice centres on close observation of species within their natural habitats. The exhibition brings together her studies of Turkish irises and works developed during her 2025 research journey in Japan focusing on lilies and other botanical forms. Considering the framework of Rooted: The Garden Within, her drawings position the plant not as metaphor but as presence, attended to with precision and clarity.
One of the most compelling objects in the exhibition is her sketchbook, Plants of Japan – Travel Journal, which traces this research process through a collection of Japanese species accompanied by a map of her itinerary. The journal reveals the continuity between field encounter and finished work, offering insight into her methodology and sustained dialogue with place, while reinforcing the exhibition’s exploration of the garden as both environment and lived experience.
With over 28 years of experience in floral design, Yunus Karma presents his Kintsugi Moss Sculpture collection, informed by the Japanese philosophy of repair through visible fracture. Combining preserved moss with repurposed vessels, he constructs sculptural forms that translate botanical material into spatial experience. The works extend the exhibition’s inquiry into nature as something inhabited physically as well as inwardly. He combines diverse materials with florals in enduring compositions that prioritise longevity.
Textile designer Elena Tash contributes works shaped by material memory and hand process. Working with vintage and antique fabrics, she develops layered surfaces where natural motifs intersect with symbolic forms. Presented in the exhibition, Garden of Memories brings together late nineteenth to early twentieth century antique hand embroidered cross stitch shirt sleeves with mid twentieth century handwoven fabric. Realised in mixed media using two hand dyeing techniques, the garment preserves the tactile and temporal traces embedded in its materials. By assembling fragments from different historical moments into a single form, Tash situates the garden not as a botanical site but as a constructed space of remembrance, where cultural memory and lived experience are carried through cloth.
Together, these works do not represent nature as an external subject, but as an internal landscape carried within us, shaped by memory, sensation and lived experience. Across photography, botanical drawing, sculptural form and textile assemblage, nature emerges not as backdrop but as condition, structuring perception, informing material choices and shaping artistic process.
Rooted: The Garden Within proposes nature as inseparable from who we are: a quiet framework through which identity forms, time accumulates and meaning is sustained. The garden becomes both site and state, a space we inhabit physically and continue to inhabit inwardly.
Sule Gazioğlu,
Curator
Exhibition Archives / Sergi Arsivi
15 - 18 May, 2025
15 - 18 Mayis, 2025
Annette Louise Solakoglu
Photo London 2025
At Photo London 2025, Sule Gazioglu Gallery presents two distinct series by Annette Louise Solakoglu—Ode to Istanbul and Botanica. Ode to Istanbul anchors the exhibition with compelling black-and-white scenes of the city, while select Botanica works introduce color and organic forms, creating a bold, dynamic juxtaposition.
Ode to Istanbul is a visual exploration of one of the world's most complex metropolises. Solakoglu's background as a filmmaker brings a distinctive narrative sensibility, urging us to imagine stories beyond the still frames, leading us on mental journeys of personal and collective memories.
Istanbul's deep and vibrant history manifests itself in the present. The series navigates the human and architectural fabric of the city, as Solakoglu's lens intimately captures individuals negotiating its dichotomies in their daily lives—caught between antiquity and modernity, opposing ideologies, and diverse cultures.
Inspired by Turkish literary masters Orhan Veli and Nazim Hikmet, Solakoglu translates their poetic voices into visual form, allowing silence and space to take on meaning. Her intuitive yet precise approach to composition and timing results in a striking aesthetic of tranquility and spaciousness, establishing her as a distinctive voice in contemporary urban photography.
This collection invites viewers to explore their own relationship with urban space and memory, suggesting that cities, like the photographs themselves, are repositories of both personal and collective histories.
While Ode to Istanbul roots itself in the rhythms and contradictions of city life. Botanica offers a meditative counterpoint—shifting focus from urban intensity to natural intricacy. Together, the two series reflect Solakoglu's broader artistic inquiry into transience memory, and the unseen narratives embedded in everyday environments. This duality—between the built and the organic, monochrome and color, documentation and abstraction—forms the emotional and conceptual core of the exhibition.
Solakoglu's Botanica series reimagines the photogram tradition through scanography, creating a dialogue between nature's ephemerality and digital preservation. Capturing both the vitality and ethereal fragility of organic forms, these works explore themes of impermanence and transformation.
The creative process is tactile choreography: rather than “capturing” light as in traditional photography, Solakoglu orchestrates each specimen's physical relationship to the scanning plane, producing a spectral interplay of color, translucency, and layered depth. Drawing from Dutch Golden Age sensibilities, each composition—both timeless and distinctly contemporary—unfolds as a compelling drama of sculptural forms while revealing the extraordinary architecture of each botanical subject.
In an era of digital impermanence, Botanica acts as both elegy and archive, preserving nature’s transience in luminous imprints.
Exhibition Archives / Sergi Arsivi
Monica Fritz
Out of Place
"Never indulging in the celebration of the “typical” qualities and features of a place, Monica Fritz prefers to wander out of place. In her gaze, the ordinary becomes mysterious, the exotic appears familiar, silences evoke harmony. A commonplace scene, one that could be anywhere, suddenly proclaims itself to belong to that instant where and when the photographer, through light and shade, has captured its essence..
A rhythmic succession of wonders: frame after frame, objects and humans cross paths by coincidence, to discover that they were made for each other. But this is a secret, or the impossible answer to the enigma that binds together Sicily and India, Sana’a and Istanbul, New York, Milan, or other fragments of space and time interrogated by the photographer’s soul."
Professor Paolo Girardelli, Bosphorus University, Art history "Bulunduğu yerlerin “tipik” özelliklerini ve kendine has yönlerini yüceltmekten daima imtina ediyor Monica Fritz, bunu yapmaktansa alışılmış dışında yerlerde gezinmeyi yeğliyor. Onun bakışında sıradan şeyler gizemli hale geliyor, egzotik dünyalar tanıdık bir çehreye bürünüyor. Sessizlikler ise ahengi çağrıştırıyor. Herhangi bir yeri andırabilecek mekânlar, fotoğrafçının ışıkla ve gölgeyle özlerini yakaladığı anda ve ölçüde aidiyetlerini ilan ediyorlar.
Ritimli bir büyülenişler geçidi bu: her fotoğraf karesinde, yolları tesadüfen kesişen nesneler ve insanlar sanki birbirleri için yaratıldıklarını keşfediyorlar. Fakat bu bir sır, ya da Sicilya’yı ve Hindistan’ı, Sana ve İstanbul’u, New York’u, Milano’yu ve fotoğrafçının ruhuyla sorguladığı daha nice zaman ve mekân adasını birbirlerine bağlayan bir gizemin asla bulunamayacak cevabı".
Profesör Paolo Girardelli, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, Sanat Tarihi
Exhibition Archives / Sergi Arsivi
Annette Louise Solakoglu
The Ancient Grounds of Ani
Kadim Topraklar: Ani
“The ruined city near the Armenian border is one of the few places in Turkey where the site is completely untouched, giving the visitor an experience an 18th-century traveller might have known. Fortifiied with walls and a citadel with a palace of the Bagratid kings, it was known as the “city of a thousand and one churches” when it was at its height under the Armenian king Gagik I (990–1020). An earthquake brought it low in 1319.
In July 2016, Ani was added to the Unesco World Heritage List, as a “medieval city [which] combines residential, religious, and military structures, characteristic of a medieval urbanism built up over the centuries by Christian and then Muslim dynasties.”
“Now the monuments of Ani are again receiving the attention of archaeologists, architectural historians and conservator.”
Cornucopia Magazine
Sergi Takvimi
2021 Eylül ayında yine Emirgan’da yer alan ikinci mağazalarını faaliyete geçirerek bir sanat galerisi olarak da hizmet vermeye başlayan Şule Gazioğlu Art & Design, yeni proje ve sergilerle sanatseverlerle buluşuyor.
New York’ta yer alan “Sotheby’s Institute of Art’ta Tasarım ve Dekoratif Sanatlar eğitimi alan Şule Gazioğlu ve Koç Üniversitesi Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü mezunu olan Kerem Bilgin tarafından 2020 yılında “Şule Gazioğlu Interiors” adı altında Emirgan’da kuruldu. Tarihten ilham alan, köklü, elektik ve sıcak mekanlar tasarlamayı kendine amaç edinen Gazioğlu ve Bilgin, üç nesildir antika ve sanatsal değer sahibi eserlerin ticaretini yapan uzman bir ailenin genç kuşak temsilcileri.
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