Distance and Proximity in Yaman Pakdil's Curatorial Practice
Essay by Nilgün Yüksel, October 13, 2026
Şükrü Aslan, sculpture detail, VUSLAT, Tarık Zafer Tunaya Cultural Centre, Istanbul. Curated by Mahmut Yaman Pakdil.
Writing about curatorial practice also means examining the different forms of representation at work in contemporary art. In contemporary art exhibitions, the relationships between artist, work, mode of display, space, viewer and curator cannot be explained solely in terms of aesthetic or organisational choices. Exhibition-making encompasses the processes by which artists and works are selected, situated within particular spaces and contexts, presented, and brought into contact with viewers.
The curator's choice of artists and spaces, the reorganisation of existing relationships between them, the placement of the artist and the work within a particular narrative, and the way the process is conducted are among the fundamental elements that shape an exhibition's regime of visibility and its impact. Once it opens to the public, however, an exhibition becomes a field of experience that extends beyond curatorial decisions. Encounters with different viewers and professionals multiply and transform its meanings, sometimes taking them beyond the initial framework. An exhibition is therefore a field in which different subjects, economic conditions, institutional expectations and strategies of representation intersect, and in which visibility, meaning and experience are continually reproduced.
In this essay, I take the curatorial practice of Mahmut Yaman Pakdil, a young curator, as the basis for a discussion of the artist, the work, modes of display, space and curatorial intervention in contemporary art exhibitions. This individual assessment provides an opportunity not only to examine one curator's professional approach, but also to consider the perspectives of young curators, the ways in which they approach exhibition-making, and the boundaries and constraints they face. Pakdil's work in different venues and under varying economic and institutional conditions offers a useful case through which to examine contemporary art's practices of circulation and visibility, which can exclude as well as unite.
From biennials, which occupy a prominent place in today's contemporary art system, to local exhibitions, one of the most persistent debates concerns the visibility of the artist. After grand, spectacular events bearing the names of star curators and involving hundreds of artists, only a handful of artists' names remain in public memory. In such organisations, the most pressing problem for the artist is that their labour may be absorbed into the process and their name eclipsed by that of the curator or a more celebrated artist. Local contexts, meanwhile, risk being shaped from the outset by anxiety over whether they will attract any attention at all.
One of the central questions in exhibition-making, then, is how to secure the visibility of the artist and the work. An artist's presence in an exhibition is not achieved simply by selecting their work; the nature of the space, the relationships between the works, the mode of display, communication strategies and the conditions under which viewers encounter the exhibition all contribute to that visibility. As one of the principal agents shaping this process, the curator must negotiate between preserving the artist's specificity and presenting the work within particular regimes of representation and circulation. How can the artist's name and work be brought to the fore without reducing them to a readily marketable image? At what point does curatorial intervention cease to open up the meaning of the work and instead turn it into an object within a predetermined narrative? These questions require us to understand visibility not simply as a matter of promotion and access, but in relation to representation, selection and structures of power.
The curatorial process also requires the relationship between artist, work and curator to be properly situated. The space in which an exhibition is installed transforms the way the works are perceived, while also determining the context in which the artist's name is situated. Particularly in historical or public spaces, or in those with distinctive architectural characteristics, exhibition-making brings the work into relation with the site's memory, materiality and patterns of use rather than presenting it against a neutral backdrop. In doing so, it repositions the creative subject within a specific setting.
Curatorial intervention also shapes the sensory and intellectual processes through which viewers construct the meaning of the exhibition.
Another dimension of this discussion concerns the dynamics of proximity and distance within curatorial practice. Proximity to the artist may be necessary in order to understand the conditions under which the work was produced and to recognise its specificity. Yet such proximity also carries the risk that the curator's perspective may overshadow the work. Distance, by contrast, may enable a critical perspective, but too much of it can obscure the artist's experience and the contextual qualities of the work. The curator's role, therefore, lies not in establishing a fixed balance, but in negotiating proximity and distance anew in response to the conditions of each exhibition.
Pakdil's practice allows us to trace these questions across a range of exhibition contexts.
Within Pakdil's curatorial practice, the question of visibility becomes particularly pronounced when large numbers of artists are brought together in a single exhibition. REUNION, which he presented at the Tarık Zafer Tunaya Cultural Centre in 2022, was a large-scale group exhibition bringing together 47 artists. In an exhibition of this kind, the number of participants enables different practices to come together under one roof, but can also make it more difficult for individual artists and their works to remain distinguishable within the exhibition as a whole. Pakdil's response was not simply to mount the exhibition, but to conceive the curator's role as one of bringing artists into contact with both the public and art professionals. To this end, he brought editors, writers, media platforms and other individuals and organisations capable of engaging closely with the work into the process, thereby extending its public reach. Although this may appear to overlap with the work of public relations, the curator's direct negotiation with these third parties did more than clarify the exhibition. It extended the process through which the exhibition, and consequently the artists, gained visibility.
Although Pakdil has made the production of visibility part of the curator's responsibility, the curator's scope for decision-making is not the same in every exhibition. Institutional expectations, budget, the possibilities offered by the venue, the duration of the exhibition and the commercial nature of the project all define the limits of curatorial intervention, making a different approach necessary in each case. At FOCUS Art Fair, for example, where commercial circulation intensifies, curatorial labour took the form of on-site installation, the careful presentation of selected works and the creation of an effective display within a short period. Pakdil was not responsible for selecting the artists or works; his role was to arrange and present the works already selected in a manner suited to the structure of the fair. An art fair demands a mode of display different from the extended periods of research and discussion associated with a biennial or institutional exhibition. In a context where his authority over selection was limited, Pakdil devised an effective arrangement from the material available, allowing the works to remain open to brief but concentrated encounters. Economic and institutional conditions therefore narrowed the curator's room for manoeuvre while also testing his exhibition-making skills and his capacity to respond to context.
VUSLAT, exhibition view, Tarık Zafer Tunaya Cultural Centre, Istanbul. Curated by Mahmut Yaman Pakdil.
The choice of space is another notable aspect of Pakdil's exhibition practice. Rather than confining his work to conventional galleries, he incorporates sites with a historical character or distinctive physical features into the exhibition itself. ANBEAN, which he presented at the Dolmabahçe Palace Art Gallery in 2023, took place in a setting marked by a powerful historical and institutional memory. FUGITHORA, presented in the same year at the Güray Museum in Cappadocia, offers a more specific example in which the physical characteristics of the site directly determined decisions about display. As a historical building that now accommodates different exhibition spaces, Dolmabahçe Palace inevitably brings an existing architectural and institutional context into the exhibition. At a distinctive site such as the Güray Museum, by contrast, the conditions of the space itself must be read before the works can be positioned.
Pakdil's contribution lies in his ability to establish the different relationship required by each site, rather than treating both spaces in the same way.
FUGITHORA warrants closer examination in this respect. The naturally humid conditions of the space ruled out a long-term display in which the works were fixed directly to the walls. The transparent suspension and fixing system devised by the curator should not, therefore, be regarded merely as a technical solution. By separating the works from the stone surfaces, the intervention pushed the space into the background while simultaneously turning it into an object of attention. The site, previously experienced primarily as an environment through which visitors moved and which generated its own meaning, became an active component of the exhibition. Pakdil's curatorial approach was not to use the space as a neutral backdrop, but to alter how it was perceived. Proximity to the site was reconstituted through a form of estrangement: viewers no longer merely moved through the space; they also experienced the way in which the space itself was being exhibited.
In Traces of Memory, this approach unfolded through the continuity of the viewer's experience. Pakdil's London exhibition brought together Lütfü Kaplanoğlu's works centred on memory, time and personal experience in a display conceived to encourage audience participation. The QR-based Memory Wall, linked to a digital screen installed in the exhibition space, invited visitors to submit a word describing a sensation or association prompted by the works. As each new word began to move across the screen, the exhibition itself began to change. It was no longer a completed, one-off presentation. Each response accumulated alongside those that preceded it, reconstructing the exhibition's meaning through associations linked to both the artist's memory and the curator's intervention. The act of interpretation took on a stream-of-consciousness quality, collapsing the distance between the work and the viewer. Pakdil's contribution is particularly clear here. Participation was not left as a symbolic gesture that merely included the viewer in the exhibition; instead, the trace left by each visitor became part of its evolving structure. The relationship between artist, curator and viewer thus moved away from a fixed model of transmission and became a field of encounter that expanded over time.
After this line of enquiry, the concepts of distance and proximity in the title can be stated more clearly. In Pakdil's curatorial practice, distance and proximity emerge as two fundamental concepts that structure the relationship between artist, work, space and viewer. Pakdil's relationship with the artist involves engaging closely with the artist's working process, conceptual concerns and the conditions that shape the work. Yet this proximity does not mean identifying with the work or simply reproducing the artist's experience. On the contrary, maintaining a certain distance makes it possible to see the work not as a direct extension of the artist's personal experience, but as a field that can be read anew under different conditions. The curator's role is therefore to approach the artist and the work while also introducing a degree of distance, thereby establishing a new relationship between them. Considering how a work might be exhibited under changing conditions opens up ways not only to position it appropriately, but also to make the artist visible in new contexts.
Distance and proximity should also be considered in relation to spatial arrangements. When viewers can approach a work from different positions, move through the space and relate to the works through their own experience, rather than viewing them from a single fixed point, the exhibition becomes a more personal encounter. Proximity makes it possible to approach the artist and the work, to seek to understand them and to establish a personal connection. Distance prevents that connection from becoming complete identification and keeps open a space in which different perspectives and new meanings may emerge. In Pakdil's curatorial practice, the interplay between these two concepts finds expression in an approach to exhibition-making that makes room for the artist, the work and the viewer at the same time.
In conclusion, Pakdil's curatorial practice reveals the multilayered nature of the process that determines the conditions under which artists and works become visible, as well as how and with
whom they come into contact. His projects across different spaces, economic conditions and institutional structures show that the curator's room for manoeuvre is not the same in every context, and that exhibition-making cannot be considered independently of these inequalities.
Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory, economic, cultural and social capital reveal the hierarchical structure of the art field. In this context, the strength of an artist's or curator's work cannot be considered in isolation from the economic resources, institutional support and social networks that make production and participation possible. These forces inevitably shape and reproduce the field as a whole by determining who is able to produce, participate and gain visibility. This, in turn, compels the curator to establish a new framework in response to the specific conditions of each exhibition.
Curatorial practice must consider not only how artists gain visibility, but also which artists remain outside these circuits, and under what conditions. Inclusivity should therefore be understood not simply as the inclusion of a greater number of artists, but in terms of how their conditions of production, differences and specific qualities are reflected in the processes through which visibility is created. The solutions Pakdil has developed across different exhibitions demonstrate that the curator cannot eliminate these conditions. Rather, by establishing new relationships within existing constraints, the curator reorganises the circulation between artist, work, space and viewer. From this perspective, curatorial practice can expand the possibilities of visibility and encounter while also producing new boundaries through processes of selection, positioning and representation.
Distance and proximity, therefore, are not merely concepts that explain the relationship between artist, work, space and viewer. They also provide a framework for understanding how the curator positions themselves within this unequal and shifting field. Pakdil's practice offers a meaningful example of how young curators, while negotiating the constraints they encounter, can create new possibilities for encounter and visibility by rethinking modes of exhibition-making.
Nilgün Yüksel is an art historian, critic and academic based in Turkey. Her research and writing focus on contemporary art, visual culture, exhibition practices and the relationship between artistic production and critical discourse.
Memory Wall, Traces of Memory, solo exhibition by Lütfü Kaplanoğlu, Yunus Emre Institute London. Curated by Mahmut Yaman Pakdil.