Cihan Çakmak
breaking is reflection
July 2 – August 22, 2026
Opening:
Thursday, July 2, 5 – 8 pm
The Berlin gallery is not barrier-free. But please feel free to call ahead at +49-30-2806605 and we are happy to assist you, so that it will be possible for you to enjoy the show.
Following successful presentations at the EIGEN + ART Lab and as part of NEW POSITION at Art Cologne, we are delighted to announce Cihan Çakmak’s first solo exhibition at our Berlin gallery.
Cihan Çakmak studied photography at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts and at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. She completed her studies in 2023 as a master’s student under Prof. Tina Bara. In her photography, drawings, videos and texts, she explores questions of identity, memory and self-perception, as well as the interconnections between individual and collective spheres of experience.
The exhibition breaking is reflection brings together early and recent photographs as well as drawings, offering a multi-layered perspective on recurring themes in Çakmak’s work – always situated at the intersection of distance and closeness, memory and reality, emancipation and external control, and reflection and distortion.
Let me be your eyes
The pictures came loose from the walls. The room is curved. The mirrors throw the light in other directions. The gaze is directed into the camera. With an outstretched hand. In the outline of a torso. With a covering hand. The gaze is directed into the camera; a single person is now standing at the other end of it, looking back.
You say that if it were only about me and only about you, and no one else were in the room, then it would be simple. But yet there are all the others. You say: Many are standing here.
At the edge of the picture, in the crack under the ceiling, in the notch in the frame, where the pen ends, where the sharp edges of the picture leave only white walls behind, at the threshold of the room, there are many standing there.
You have found the place where you end and they begin, the place where it is colder than expected, the place where the story begins, the place where the pain resides; and that’s how the images came back to you:
[Refraction refers to the change in direction of a wave when passing between two media with different propagation speeds.]
It’s not you, it’s not me
In the picture, at the spot where the pain resides, you stand. And now they are part of it. And even if this pain isn’t theirs to share, they, too, have cries to bear.
One could say: And when we cry, we always cry for everything else as well, for everything we forgot to cry about; or in place of those who couldn’t cry; for all those for whom the time to cry never arrived.
You say we would never see a person like this if it weren’t for photography. We can never see someone who is alone.
You look at me, in this moment when I was alone. And so you are alone too. You learn to see yourself as this person who is now looking back. Who is saved in the picture, at least for this time, which can be measured like the dimensions of a frame. Which holds things together, as if there were a picture one could get a hold of. That is how you give us an image of it.
[The speed of light depends on the properties of the medium it travels through.]
You cannot see me from where I look at myself.
You say: Photography is really a form of image stabilization, an improbable fixation. Keeping things in place as if there were an image one could get a hold of.
Thus the dream-images return, framed as reality. One shouldn’t read too much into it. Or: Let’s read something into it.
[The direction of the refracted ray results from the ratio of the refractive indices of the two media.]
I’ll be your mirror
The images spread horizontally, meeting us halfway. The conditions of their creation recede behind layers of paint and ink. What immediately preceded them remains unknown. What followed, too. Until we are alone with the images again. Meanwhile, the conditions of their appearance shift.
I look at you, in this moment when you were alone. And so I am alone as well.
You say: Sometimes it helps to swap the I and the you. Just as an attempt. The sentence remains the same. But its direction changes. What just then appeared as a description of another person can now be read as an experiment on oneself. The shift is slight. Its consequences are not. Faced with the impossibility to bridge the distance. We are left with the difference. It’s not me.
[The refractive index describes the relationship between the speed of light and the medium.]
Please, take down your hand
You say: The others become mirrors in front of which we come to a stand. Stand-ins for an emptiness whose origin lies elsewhere. The real pain disappears behind the people who take its place. It’s not you.
A photograph shows a person alone in a room. As soon as someone looks at it, this solitude is already interrupted. The camera registers a state whose observation would otherwise be impossible. The image makes it accessible, but the conditions of its creation always remain outside the picture. The pain belongs to no one else.
[When a ray of light strikes the interface between two media, the direction and speed of its propagation are redefined.]
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know
You say: It’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine who is observing and who is being observed.
One face appears multiple times. Another is missing. A hand obscures a gaze. A body is cut by the frame. The attribution remains incomplete. The movement takes place within the image. Or within the person observing it. Both bodies—the one looking and the one looking back—remain intact in the recognition of their difference.
[The law of reflection describes the bouncing of a wave at an interface. The law of reflection describes the relationship between the angle of incidence and the angle of reflection. Both are equal.]
A hand to your darkness so you won’t be afraid
You say: We’ve learned to confuse the surreal with the unreal. But the term describes something else. Something that is present all the time and only rarely becomes visible. You say: A second layer of experience. The possibility that this might be reality.
The same shifts reappear in dreams. Rooms merge into one another. People change positions. A conversation continues in the next room. The sequence cannot be reconstructed. Maybe that’s why they’re written down. Maybe that’s why they’re photographed. Not in order to preserve them. But in order to determine their direction.
[A reflection doesn’t originate in the place where it’s perceived. Its location is virtual.]
Fabian Saul
Translation by Hagen Hamm