Pilot Gallery Istanbul

This presentation brings together Hamra Abbas and İrem Tok, two artists who explore material as a carrier of memory, history, and transformation. Abbas transforms lapis lazuli, jasper, and marble into botanical stone inlays that echo architectural ornament and geological time. Tok constructs miniature, speculative landscapes from books, lichens, stones, sculptural fragments, and reflective plexiglass, where fragments of body, nature, and history converge into dense material narratives.

Hamra Abbas was born in Kuwait in 1976 and lives and works in Boston and Lahore. Abbas’ artistic practice draws from a myriad of sources and takes a diversity of forms. Her works originate from encounters and experiences – an image, icon or gesture – that are manipulated by the artist transforming its scale, function or medium. Her intention is to deconstruct the act of seeing by recreating images that form part of a collective memory. Unrestrained by subject matter or media, she takes an investigative approach to produce a diverse and holistic body of work addressing notions of cultural history, sexuality, violence, ornamentation, devotion and faith.

Irem Tok (b. 1982) lives and works in Istanbul. The concepts such as fragility, temporariness, helplessness lies at the core of Irem Tok’s practice. Tok plays with the boundaries between human, nature and culture. The artist uses different mediums such as sculpture, painting, animation, ceramics and scenes, and create atmospheres with fine details. Tok's production process includes research, interpretation, discovery, collection, accumulation, thinking, note taking, drawing and combining. By transforming the symbols of knowledge like encylopedias and books she confronts the historical narratives and encourages a subjective one.