Nejbir Erkol

Nejbir Erkol (b. 1995, Nusaybin/Mardin) completed her undergraduate studies in Painting at Mardin Artuklu University and earned her MFA from Hacettepe University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Painting. Focusing on the concept of precarity, her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, installation, performance, and video. Shaped by the geography she inhabits, Erkol explores themes such as fragility, vulnerability, pain, and trauma, often through the lens of her own body. In doing so, she intentionally employs materials that are as precarious as the concepts she engages with.

I’ve made a mistake and yet I made something

In her installation work presented at SAHA Studio, Nejbir Erkol bespeaks of a “state of the world” based on her experiences in another country where she traveled for a project in 2024: The artist was detained for hours at a German border police station due to an unforeseen situation. After a strip search by the police, she is deported and finds herself wandering in the rain at midnight on the Polish border. She comes across an illuminated sign reading RELAX HOTEL. The level of absurdity of what she experienced and the combination of this landscape with her own story creates an intersection of uncanny. Erkol’s installation is inspired by this event, which feels like a nightmare and a liminary state, the artist finds a link between her deportation and the border region where she was born.&nbsp,

Since she could not document what she experienced during the moments when the police confiscated her phone, she tries to concretize what she can remember throughout the SAHA Studio program. In this process, the stories, encounters, violent and ridiculous moments she witnesses, random objects left by strangers that cross her path confront Erkol again with the notion and the reality of being at and from the border.

While constructing the space, she includes the landscape of the border territory where she was born and raised, along with the hotel signboard she encountered when she was deported. In her installation, it is possible to see the hole left by the rocket that fell in front of her house a few years ago, as well as the table where she was interrogated. By juxtaposing the absurdities she has experienced, Erkol attempts to restage these highly complex and vivid moments that evoke the hurt and the weight of remembering and forgetting. Harnessing different temporalities, and through the interrogation desk placed in the center, she questions the actual subject in these events.