Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.
Merve Kaplan, DE
Yoldaş, 2025 © Merve Kaplan. Photo © Manifesta 16 Ruhr / Ivan Erofeev.
In her artistic work, Merve Kaplan deals with questions of belonging, home and the in-between. The starting point is personal and collective experiences of migration, rituals and everyday family practices. Kaplan is interested in geographical, social and emotional transitions, as well as repetition, language and symbolic action. She condenses memories, narratives and observations into spatial situations and performative moments. In works such as Yoldaş, she combines different disciplines into a reduced, precise visual language and reflects on proximity, community, loss and commodity cycles with great sensitivity for objects and scales.