Contour Gallery, Rotterdam, presents The Waves,
a group exhibition curated by Nesli Gül, on view from 17 January to 1 March 2026.
Bringing together works by Gamze Öztürk, Anouk Kruithof, Lana Mesić, and Mesut Öztürk, the exhibition explores the fluid relationship between self and environment through questions of identity, memory, and interconnectedness within an ever-evolving urban and cultural landscape.
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s experimental modernist novel The Waves, the exhibition reinterprets Woolf’s poetic, cyclical structure into a visual and spatial dialogue. Rather than presenting identity as a fixed or autonomous condition, the exhibition The Waves approaches it as relational, performative, and continuously shaped by memory, heritage, ecology, and social context. Across performance, video, installation, and sculpture, the exhibition invites audiences to reflect on how personal and collective identities are formed through lived experience and material relations.
In The Waves, memory is treated not merely as individual recollection but as a cultural and material process, embedded in gestures, rituals, textiles, objects and landscapes. The exhibition foregrounds interconnectedness as both a human and more-than-human condition, asking how bodies, environments, technologies, and histories mutually shape one another.
In a time marked by social fragmentation, ecological anxiety, and the search for belonging,
The Waves offers a timely meditation on transformation, care and coexistence.
