Elhamra: Learning from craft, 2024

Solo Exhibition

“Bilal Yılmaz is well known for his long-term engagement with craft as a medium that carries a lot of stories and production possibilities, therefore enabling him to conceptualise and realise his ideas. His motivation is to subvert the current, mostly romanticised and bound to the past approach to craft, and to reintroduce craft as a valuable production possibility for creative projects within and beyond the contemporary art context.

“Elhamra: Learning from craft” is inspired by the artist’s recent field research on Kütahya’s çini craft ecosystem — commissioned by Pera Museum and conducted together with curator Lydia Chatziiakovou. For the works of the exhibition, Bilal Yılmaz uses brass, found materials, movement, light and shadow to create contemporary variations of centuries-old traces of craft. The creative process behind the works reveals an almost obsessive process of transformation, which echoes the slow transformations of craft through experimentation with forms, materials and techniques. A process that incorporates both tradition and innovation; collective and individual ingenuity; leaning on the past while investing in the future.

Bilal Yılmaz’s “Elhamra: Learning from craft” can therefore provide a case-study for making and thinking through craft today, a guide for a contemporary, craft-based imaginary.”

Curator: Lydia Chatziiakovou 

Gallery team: Ece Köksal, İdil Burkutoğlu, Emre Erdoğan, Ali Duran, Adem Coșkun  

Production assistant: Emrullah Büker 

Production team: Birol Arifoğlu (“Grinder” engine and automation), Kerem Atay (“Grinder” technical design) 

Craftsmen: İsmail Arer (carpenter), Murat Aydın (CNC carving), Mustafa Kemal Bereket (metal lathe), Emrullah Beşik (metalsmith), Adem Can (stone mason), Cemal Karadayı (metal lathe), Cevat Köroğlu (metal lathe), Nedim Köroğlu (revolver lathe), Lokman Cilingir (metal spinning), Hüseyin Özçil (varnisher), Cevdet Özer (metalsmith), Hacı Ahmet Söbüçovalı (carpenter), Mustafa Taylan (brass lathe), Kamil Türnüklü (oven-dry painting)

Sound design: Zeynel Sağ