Love and the Serpent
04.09 – 07.09.2025
The Armory Show, New York
Javits Center
Booth 140
Erol Akyavaş
Mehtap Baydu
Semiha Berksoy
Elif Uras
For The Armory Show 2025, Galerist and Galeri Nev present Love and the Serpent, featuring Semiha Berksoy, Erol Akyavaş, Elif Uras, and Mehtap Baydu. These distinguished artists from Turkey explore the intertwined nature of love and lust at the intersections of desire, intimacy, and consciousness.
At first glance, Berksoy and Uras embody ‘love’, while Akyavaş and Baydu evoke ‘the serpent’. Yet, upon closer inspection, these boundaries dissolve, revealing a fluid interplay between the two. Akyavaş’s provocative icons and recently unearthed ’68 photographs, exhibited for the first time, embrace the ethos of bodily freedom and unrestrained love, positioning his fragmented figures closer to devotion than mere lust. Berksoy’s drawings on paper, paintings and colossal bed sheets portray love as ecstatic and devastating; her theatrical works transmute eroticism into an existential force: equal, reciprocal, and liberated 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 subverts the gaze by manipulating her image—at times dismembered, at times cross-dressed—reclaiming authority through fractured self-representations.
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 just for our two galleries, but within the broader contemporary art world. Together, 'love' and 'the serpent' exist in dynamic flux, casting the body as a vessel for desire that guides transformation and the enduring flame of creation.
