Gülşah Ayla Bayrak

Borrowing its title from an 1872 essay by Namık Kemal, the Ottoman intellectual who challenged European misconceptions about the “East” during a period of sweeping reform, and from Zeynep Çelik’s book of the same title, “Europe Knows Nothing About the Orient” frames Gülşah Ayla Bayrak’s practice through a critique of representation.

Moving between photography, installation, found objects, and performative gestures, Bayrak treats photography less as a documentary medium than as a material that slips between evidence and fiction. Objects gathered from Turkey, Belgian flea markets, online second-hand platforms, and personal networks no longer affirm their origins; instead, they reveal the projections and misreadings accumulated through their circulation.

Rather than searching for an authentic image of the “Orient,” Bayrak questions whether such authenticity can exist at all. Her work suggests that culture is not a fixed essence to be represented but something continually negotiated through relationships.

In this sense, “Europe Knows Nothing About the Orient” argues that Europe’s failure to know the Orient lies less in ignorance than in its insistence on reducing it to stable definitions. By embracing ambiguity and transformation over certainty, Bayrak unsettles inherited ways of seeing.

Poster designed by @nura.mahow ✨

Opening
11 July 2026, 20:00

Exhibition
11.07 ⎯ 19.07.2026

Opening Hours
Sat–Sun, 10.00 ⎯ 18.00

The Building / Genk
Hoogstraat 2
3600 Genk, Belgium

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