Rey Akdogan

Rey Akdogan turns her attention to the standardization of materials and perceptual processes that shape our visual present. Her often spatially oriented works unfold across media, moving between projection, sculpture, and installation. She examines how atmospheres come into being, and how color, light, and material qualities organize sensory experience and generate affective spaces. The materials she employs—color gels, printed plastics, fragments of packaging—originate in industrial and scenographic contexts and, in their customary settings, function to steer the gaze and regulate attention. In Akdogan’s arrangements, they slip out of these frameworks, rendering the operative logic of such systems newly tangible.

A central focus of the exhibition at Haus am Waldsee is Akdogan’s Carousel series, which she has been developing since 2010: thin layers of color gels, Mylar, and transparent remnants mounted in 35-mm slides rotate through the beam of a projector. What emerges are not photographic images but material configurations—excerpts, fragments, and overlays that gently unsettle the apparent uniformity of industrial surfaces. With each rotation, tonalities shift: colors tilt, lines and structures find new alignments, familiar textures dissolve into different rhythms. What seems known turns elusive yet remains tethered to its material origin. A field of transitions unfolds in which material and perception continually recalibrate their relation.

For this exhibition, a larger group of these Carousels is shown together for the first time, allowing their tempos and subtle shifts to accumulate across the galleries in a spacious, polyphonic installation.

Curated by
Beatrice Hilke