THE ARMORY SHOW: SEMİHA BERKSOY, EROL AKYAVAŞ, ELİF URAS, MEHTAP BAYDU

For the 2025 edition of The Armory Show, Galerist and Galeri Nev present Love and the Serpent, featuring Erol Akyavaş, Semiha Berksoy, Elif Uras, and Mehtap Baydu. This distinguished group of artists from Turkey explores the intertwined nature of love and lust at the intersections of desire, intimacy, and consciousness. 

At first glance, Berksoy and Uras seem to embody “love,” while Akyavaş and Baydu evoke “the serpent.” Yet upon closer inspection, these boundaries dissolve, revealing a dynamic interplay between the two. Akyavaş’s provocative iconas and recently unearthed 1968 photographs - most exhibited for the first time- embrace the ethos of bodily freedom and unrestrained love, positioning his fragmented yet liberated figures closer to devotion than to mere lust. Berksoy’s drawings on paper, as well as on colossal bed sheets, portray love as both ecstatic and devastating; her theatrical works transmute eroticism into an existential force: equal, reciprocal, and free from guilt or control. 

Uras and Baydu contribute contemporary perspectives to this dialogue. Through her ceramics, Uras reasserts female agency and fertility, presenting women as unapologetic protagonists. Meanwhile, Baydu manipulates her own image - sometimes dismembered, sometimes cross-dressed - to claim authority through self-objectification, as her fragmented self-representations reclaim control over the gaze.

The simultaneous exhibitions of Akyavaş and Uras at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Berksoy at Hamburger Bahnhof, and Baydu at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden further underscore the interconnected narratives among these artists- not only for our two galleries but also within the broader contemporary art world. Together, Love and the Serpent exists in a state of dynamic flux, casting the body as a vessel for desire that guides both transformation and the enduring flame of creation.