Cursed gaze: A discussion on power and the construction of the self
- İlker Cihan Biner
- 23 Eki
- 6 dakikada okunur
Can Akgümüş’s solo exhibition Triarchy takes place at KAIROS between October 18 and November 22, 2025. On this occasion, we reflect on humanity’s desire for dominion and the fragilities shaped by that very desire
Words: İlker Cihan Biner
Can Akgümüş, Broken Circle, 2025, Archival pigment print, 60x200 cm
0. The end or the threshold
Has the end of humanity arrived? The question itself has already become an industry: the dystopia industry. The spectacle world’s exploitation of humanity’s states of panic and fragility is a familiar issue. I am not complaining about the proliferation of studies on the Anthropocene or the growing critical perspectives on humanity’s position. It is important to recognize how close we are to the collapse. Once we understand that our embodied lives are shaken by irrational resentment, racism, colonialism, class hierarchy, and sexism, our capacity for action expands. In this sense, the issue has a clear set of contours.
For centuries, humankind has regarded its own existence as divine; destroying the earth and the sky from a so-called state of perfection. This posture of superiority persists as the human mind continues to see itself as a “machine,” a “computer program,” an “Artificial Intelligence,” thus sustaining its dominance at the center of the world. Meanwhile, caught in the whirlpool of self-improvement capitalism, an ever-growing number of people have come to see their bodies as nothing more than pure energy. Undoubtedly, all of this amounts to a grand illusion.
We possess neither a privileged brain nor a unique biological system. We are not even software. The human being is, above all, a creature in constant pursuit. Our search for truth, about our own species and the other beings with whom we coexist and share companionship, continues.
Can Akgümüş’s exhibition Triarchy, held at Kairos between October 18 and November 22, 2025, does not shy away from delving into these questions. His works confront the persistent human obsession with domination, the very impulse that has long haunted our species. The artist resists generalizing judgments; the planet we inhabit is not treated as a homogeneous whole. Nor does the exhibition naturalize ideas of humanity as inherently good or evil. Avoiding reductive assertions such as “this is what neoliberalism is,” Akgümüş, in Triarchy, stages an encounter with the “now” building bridges between fragility and resilience, and viewing the human not through progressive or universalist lenses, but as a historical being in flux.
Triarchy unfolds in three distinct chapters: The Thrones, The Body, The Act, and Black Swan.
1. Intersectional matters
Left: Can Akgümüş, The Thrones series, Regina Libidinis - Lustqueen, 2025, Archival pigment print, 50x37 cm Right: Can Akgümüş, The Thrones series, Regina Solitudinis - Solitudequeen, 2025, Archival pigment print, 100x75 cm
The artist traces systems of governance across different moments in history, gradually bringing the narrative into the present. The series titled The Thrones confronts the viewer with thrones that appear at times primitive, at times opulent. Certain questions arise beside us: Do we hold sovereignty over our own lives? When we crown ourselves, can we truly become the center of the world? Yet, my encounter with these works opened up a different space of inquiry.
Whether people have always governed one another, or when power structures first emerged, remains open to debate. Today, we struggle to build alternative economies and social systems; even imagining the end of neoliberalism feels nearly impossible. Still, without succumbing to despair, we must remain resilient. Alongside politics, we need anthropology and the urgency of revisiting those eras when political experiments were undertaken and systems were frequently overturned. For parallel experiments continue today. In ancient Greece and Rome, slavery was a defining institution, yet the Indigenous tribes of North America followed entirely different models of life. The pursuit of stateless, masterless communities resonates with the conviction that “another world is possible.” The positions I point to are not calls for a naïve return to the past, but rather an invitation to imagine a future: one that accounts for technology, artificial intelligence, and our cyborg conditions, without forgetting the hybrid beings we have already become.
While reflecting on these questions, I felt a distinct point of convergence with Akgümüş upon encountering the second chapter of the exhibition, The Body, The Act. The artist does not simply expose mechanisms of oppression. Rivalries, conspiracies, and manipulations already stain the blood-soaked pages of history. Yet it is worth remembering that within an evolutionary framework, Kropotkin placed the notion of mutual aid alongside the motto of struggle for existence. For anthropologist David Graeber, too, humans have always been a little bit communist. Still, the impulses toward domination, humiliation, and even killing that arise within the human psyche are nothing new. Contrary to what some anthropologists have imagined, so-called primitive societies were not entirely free either.
2. The crown
Left: Can Akgümüş, The Body, The Act I, 2025, Archival pigment print, 100x75 cm Right: Can Akgümüş, The Body, The Act, 2025, Archival pigment print, 30x22cm
The recurring image of the crown in the exhibition relates to the authority of kings and sultans to pass judgment. Once again, we are confronted with the question of power. The crown holds a deeply symbolic posture, yet it also embodies the position of decision-maker and arbiter. The loss of the crown has, throughout the ages, precipitated crises: migrations, genocides, famine, and countless others
Jean Genet is among the writers who have influenced Can Akgümüş. Considering that in Genet’s world sin, evil, and perverse desires manifest as forms of rebellion, it becomes essential to question the depth of the crown motif in the exhibition. As Georges Bataille writes of Genet’s stance: “He sits wearing a baron’s crown adorned with fake pearls. When the crown falls and the pearls scatter, he removes his false teeth, places them atop his head, and with pursed lips shouts: ‘Ladies! Now I’m a queen!’” (1)
Representations of power often serve the function of imposing a final verdict. This is precisely why the Genet quotation resonates here. The crown evokes images of court rulings, decrees, and detentions prolonged without indictment—expressions of those moments when justice turns into injustice. The deconstructive gesture that Genet embodies reappears in some of Akgümüş’s works: Void of Course, The Body, The Act I & II… The visages and postures of men in power are rendered as metaphors in pieces such as The Thrones Regina Solitudinis (Queen of Solitude) and The Thrones Regina Libidinis - Lustqueen
The position of metaphors does not arise from ornamental flourishes of language, nor are they mere acts of comparison. Their nature is uncanny, chaotic, and fluid. Although they sometimes risk constraining fields of meaning, they also extend the forming webs of thought onto tangible planes. By moving beyond the aesthetic phenomenon, they expand the possibilities of expression. The dark, ironic metaphors in Akgümüş’s works likewise serve as indicators of the decay inherent in representations of central power.
3. Generous melancholy
Left: Can Akgümüş, Black Swan VI, 2025, Archival pigment print, 50x37,5 cm Right: Can Akgümüş, Void Of Course, 2025, Archival pigment print, 70x100 cm
In the final chapter of the exhibition, a sense of withdrawal becomes perceptible. The artist’s notes, sketches, drafts of writing, and half-formed words appear as fragments of a personal archive rendered in shades of gray, in a state of muddiness. These materials simultaneously resurface in the details of certain photographs or take shape as the imprint of Akgümüş’s own footsteps.
In this final section of Triarchy, there emerges a godlessness stripped of crowns, the kind the artist has alluded to throughout. Akgümüş’s presence, memory, and perspective stand before us not as ideals or utopias, but as realities. What unfolds is a series of remnants without essence: a practice built from fragments and discarded materials, composed through the echoes of inner anarchy, a poetics of leaving traces. One might even say it gestures toward care and solidarity, toward both individual and collective horizons.
Akgümüş’s exhibition Triarchy is in motion; shimmering along boundaries and interstitial zones, unafraid of incompleteness, marked by traces that remain unfinished. It is precisely about perceiving and engaging with the thresholds to which the artist invites us.
Can Akgümüş, Triarchy, Exhibition view, 2025, KAIROS. Photo: Hızır Erdem Uygun
Triarchy is on view at KAIROS through November 22, 2025. For more information about the exhibition;
Yorumlar