Dirimart London presents Colour is the Place, a group exhibition curated by Jessica Cerasi, featuring works by Hashel Al Lamki (b. 1986), Çağla Ulusoy (b. 1989), Tala Worrell (b. 1991), and Berke Yazıcıoğlu (b. 1993).
Colour is the Place brings together four painters for whom the canvas operates as a site of reflection, where contradictions need not be resolved immediately, but can instead be held and embraced. For these artists, the canvas becomes a place for processing, for dreaming, for working through what resists resolution in any other way.
Hashel Al Lamki, Çağla Ulusoy, Tala Worrell, and Berke Yazıcıoğlu each carry multiple worlds within them, culturally, spiritually, and sensorily. In their canvases, these multiplicities do not cancel each other out, the everyday and the sublime can coexist, the foreign and the familiar press against each other until something new emerges in the friction.
Within this shared terrain, painting becomes less a method of resolution than a way of staying with complexity. In Hashel Al Lamki’s practice, memory is not fixed but sedimented, and landscapes are treated as living archives: sites where ecology, migration, and tectonic movement converge. Rather than representing place, his work listens to it, as if meaning is something slowly accumulated rather than declared.
A sense of layered perception extends into Çağla Ulusoy’s work, where images form through accumulation rather than composition. Subconscious fragments, cultural residues, and sensory impressions are pressed into densely painte surfaces. In these works, colour and texture do not stabilise form so much as keep it in motion, allowing contradiction to remain visible rather than resolved.
In a different register, Tala Worrell’s abstraction is grounded in the ethics of perception itself. Born in New York and raised in Abu Dhabi, her work is shaped by an awareness that seeing is never neutral. Each gesture on the canvas carries the weight of negotiation between belief systems, inherited structures, and the quiet demands of coexistence, so that painting creates a space in which decisions are never purely aesthetic but involve the working through of ethical dilemmas.
Berke Yazıcıoğlu’s practice traces how desire is organised, redirected, or contained within social structures. Moving between digital drawing, painting, and design, his works hold together intimacy and regulation, asking how personal impulses are shaped by collective codes. Even in their most charged moments, his compositions remain attentive to how looking itself is structured, and how the viewer is positioned within systems of meaning, gender, and cultural expectation.
For these artists, colour is where this thinking begins. Before composition, before subject, colour does its affective work on the body: a blue that lowers the temperature of a room, a red that arrives in the chest before it registers in the eye, an ochre that carries the specific warmth of a remembered landscape. Colour is the Place unites works where colour is not decoration or description; it is a primary language, capable of saying what words can only attempt to approach. Each work asks to be stood with, dreamed in front of, and felt before it can be understood. Like the internal states from which they emerge, these paintings remain generously, stubbornly open, conveying the productive tension of living between.
Colour is the Place is on view from 4 June to 18 July at Dirimart London.
