Having recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary, Galeri Nev revisits selected exhibition ideas from its four-decade history, reinterpreting them through today's lens. The first of these is NEVGENERATION, first held in 2009 to celebrate the gallery’s 25th anniversary with artists who were themselves 25 years old at the time, and was later held five more times with invited artists between the ages of 25 and 35.
Now, seventeen years after the first NevGeneration, the exhibition returns to ponder questions once voiced but never exhausted; art’s restless search for reality, the artist’s social and political presence, and that elusive, perhaps even childlike sense of inner mystery. Yet it also casts a critical glance at the past decade and a half, during which the notion of the “young artist” has at times been displayed and exploited almost as a spectacle or curiosity. In response, the 2026 edition sheds the condition of youth entirely, allowing NEVGENERATION to take on a different, more expansive meaning. It now gathers around “new” names, not defined by age, but by distance and proximity; artists the gallery does not yet fully know, but follows with curiosity, excitement, a desire to linger longer and look closer. No longer aiming to represent a single generation in breadth, the exhibition instead moves across generations and geographies, choosing depth, giving space for a fuller body of work from a single artist.
Titled “Read My Lips,” the exhibition brings together works by Oliver C. Jones, Nalan Dağıstan, Rajab Eryiğit, Aylin Zaptçıoğlu, and Özdemir Asaf. Opening on Saturday, March 7, with the participation of the artists and the Asaf family, the exhibition unfolds around the idea of fragility. The works reconstruct, through diverse materials, the shells we develop to protect ourselves from accidents, conflicts and wars. Their works are presented both in their singularity and in relation to one another, converging in poetry as a resilient armor forged through deep wounds.
The title “Read My Lips” conveys a sense of intimacy that almost renders words unnecessary. Quiet yet resolute, it proposes to viewers a space of protection, one that can also hold their own vulnerabilities within it. And from within that quiet, it calls out: “I mean it—come closer.”
