Zeki Demirkubuz has always been drawn to silence. His films often linger in rooms where little happens, where a look or a pause carries more weight than any line of dialogue. That sensibility now unfolds in still images. At CerModern, his second solo photography exhibition, Hayatta ve Fotoğrafta En İyi Pozu Yalnızlar Verir (“In Life and in Photography, the Best Pose Belongs to the Lonely”), brings together thirty photographs taken across two decades and more than twenty countries. Each frame seems to hold its breath, as if waiting for the story that will never arrive.
The photographs are stripped of spectacle. Faces appear small, half-turned, often absorbed in their own thoughts. Streets, walls, and fields stretch out behind them, carrying traces of places that might be anywhere. The stillness is deliberate; Demirkubuz refuses the easy comfort of beauty or drama. Instead, he captures what is left when all gesture is gone—the bare fact of being in the world. The result feels like an extension of his cinema, yet quieter, more distilled, almost as if the camera has stepped back to watch itself seeing.
Curated by Ebru Yılmaz and organized with Art On, the exhibition builds on its Istanbul debut but takes on a new tone in Ankara. CerModern’s austere halls echo with the same solitude that fills his frames. The photographs are allowed space to exist, their stillness deepened by the surrounding air and light. Visitors move slowly through the rooms, guided less by a story than by recognition itself: the quiet realization that loneliness, when faced directly, is not something to flee but something to see.
Demirkubuz has said almost nothing about the series, which may be part of its meaning. These images do not explain; they wait. They ask the viewer to remain in their company, to listen to the silence that links art and life. In their restraint there is an uncommon honesty, a reminder that sometimes the most faithful act is to stay still and look back.