Gözde İlkin

17th Biennale de Lyon | France

SAHA supports Gözde İlkin’s new project at 17th Lyon Biennale curated by the artistic director Isabelle Bertolotti and guest curator Alexia Fabre between 21 September - 5 December 2025. Entitled Les voix des fleuves, Crossing the water, the 17th edition of the Lyon Biennale invites artists to interrogate and investigate the subject of the waxing and waning relationships of human beings with one another and with their environment.

For the Lyon Biennial, Gözde Ilkin would like to continue a textile installation project initiated in 2018 under the title Majority of Accent. Inspired by the industrial history and subterranean memory of the Grandes Locos site, she would like to carry out a residency project with local people in the Mulatière area, to collect stories and memories linked to this place from the workers. This work will enable her to create a large fabric printed with a rocky ground motif, a breeding ground for ideas and images linked to work and migratory flows. Alongside this sewing and embroidery work, carried out with former workers from the railway site, she will be collecting and studying the invasive plants of the Grandes Locos, which will inspire her to create new motifs embroidered on the textile and will try to use some of them for plant dyes.

Gözde İlkin (1981, Kütahya).Made from found domestic fabrics — sheets, tablecloths or curtains — which retain memories of everyday life, Gözde Ilkin's textile pieces explore questions of memory, belonging and social identity. Her painted and embroidered motifs reflect historical and contemporary aspects of power and domination, as well as the processes of transformation and destruction that Man has inflicted on nature. Gözde Ilkin's work, draws on ecofeminist theories to invent alternative modes of relationship between living beings, focusing on bonds of kinship that have already been forged between different species. Lives and works in İstanbul.

About Lyon Biennale

La Biennale de Lyon is a cultural enterprise that alternately devises, produces and holds two major international events: the Dance Biennale and the Contemporary Art Biennale. In doing so it supports, promotes, develops and spreads their values.