SERKAN SARIER
Born in Germany to a Turkish/Bosnian migrant family, my practice is informed by experiences of migration, displacement, and growing up as a queer Muslim within environments that often felt hostile to difference. Much of my work emerges from negotiating forms of visibility and invisibility: how bodies adapt, camouflage themselves, distort or transform to survive social spaces that are experienced as unwelcoming. Working across painting, sculpture, and performance through what I describe as “living sculpture,” I approach the body less as a stable entity than as a site of continuous becoming. Figures in my work rarely remain fixed. They dissolve into landscapes, merge with botanical forms or exist in ambiguous states between human, vegetal, geological and atmospheric matter. These transformations become metaphors for adaptation, belonging and the psychological negotiations required to inhabit environments marked by pressure or exclusion. Recent works explore hostile environments not only as places of danger but also as spaces that shape new forms of life. Layers of paint accumulate like geological histories, while bodies emerge as porous structures influenced by memory, inherited histories of displacement, desire and ecology. Ultimately, my practice considers transformation as both a strategy of survival and a mode of relation. Rather than treating identity, body, and landscape as separate categories, I understand them as interconnected processes that continually shape one another. Through this shifting terrain, I seek to create spaces where vulnerability, ambiguity, and adaptation become generative forces, opening possibilities for new forms of belonging.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2026 Corrupting Gaze, Collaboration with Casey Spooner for Gallery Weekend, Berlin, Germany
2025 Novan Erebus, PILEVNELI, Art Düsseldorf, Germany
2024 Hubris, PILEVNELI, Istanbul, Turkey
2023 Weeping Glitch, PILEVNELI Yalıkavak, Bodrum, Mugla, Turkey
2022 Swarm, PILEVNELI, Istanbul, Turkey
2021 Generation Kanacke “Der Spiegel Nr.31 / 29.07.1973”, PILEVNELI, Zwölf Apostel Church, Berlin, Germany
2019 Sibling, LaPlace Project Space Paris, Paris, France
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2025 Art Basel Hong Kong, PILEVNELI, Hong Kong, China
2024 Viewing Room, PILEVNELI, Istanbul, Turkey
Group Show, PILEVNELI Yalıkavak, Bodrum, Mugla, Turkey
2023 Wer wir sind, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany
2022 Figures, PILEVNELI x König x Continua, Bodrum, Mugla, Turkey
PILEVNELI Yalıkavak, Bodrum, Mugla, Turkey
2020 They Eat Their Young, Stiftung Reinbeckhallen, Berlin, Germany
2021 PILEVNELI X KÖNIG Kaplankaya, Mugla, Turkey
2019 Im Ratzenloch, Schloss Sacrow Potsdam, Berlin, Germany
2018 Malevolent Eldritch Shrieking, Attercliffe Gallery, Sheffield, UK (Curated by Paul Morrison)
Do I Matter, Goldsmiths University of London graduation exhibition, London, UK
2017 Conspiracy of the Real Artistic Perspectives in a Post-Truth Climate, Tenderpixel Gallery, London, UK
They, Deptford X Gallery, London, UK
Trilogy, Goldsmiths Gallery, London, UK