Dirimart is delighted to present Silent Presence, Ebru Duruman’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together a new body of paintings, the exhibition explores the shifting boundaries of the self and the ways in which identity is continually reshaped by experience. Bodies merge with forests, rivers and stone; landscapes grow through the human form; figures become entangled with one another; and faces repeat, fragment and disappear. As these forms move between the human and the natural, the distinction between body, memory and landscape becomes increasingly uncertain.
There are moments when the life we imagined gives way to something unfamiliar. Through love, loss, migration, parenthood, illness or simply the passage of time, change reshapes not only our circumstances but our sense of who we are. Silent Presence begins in this fragile space between who we were and who we are becoming. Duruman’s paintings emerge from a period of personal change, yet move beyond autobiography to reflect on a shared experience of transformation. At the heart of the exhibition lies a question: how do we remain ourselves after life changes us?
This questions unfolds through the relationship between the body and nature. Nature becomes a language of transformation, with bodies and landscapes growing into one another and blurring the boundaries between what is internal and what lies beyond. Trees, roots, water and stone merge with the human form, while individual figures overlap and transform into one another. Faces appear less as fixed markers of identity than as places bearing traces of experience. Figures dissolve into their surroundings and emerge in new forms, suggesting an understanding of identity not as something fixed, but as something living, capable of adapting, shifting and becoming.
In Silent Presence, what has been lived does not simply disappear. It settles quietly into the body, into memory and into the landscapes we carry within us. The past self is neither entirely lost nor entirely preserved, but remains as a trace: transformed, absorbed and still present. Duruman’s paintings inhabit this space of quiet persistence, where what remains is not a fixed sense of self but an ongoing process of becoming.
Ebru Duruman’s Silent Presence will be on view at Dirimart Pera from 17 September to 25 October 2026.
