Following a short interlude, T H E P I L L ® is pleased to present the second act of Leylâ Gediz's STAGEHAND entitled STAGEHAND — Act II between 17 April — 29 May 2025.
Turning the gallery into a semi-fictional theatrical stage caught in the course of a set change, the exhibition focuses on support structures and processes usually held outside frames of representation.
Unfolding through a series of large-scale paintings that fragment and recompose archival images and support structures from the theatre, Leylâ Gediz’s exhibition opens up a space of translation between the processes of painterly composition and those underlying a set change. In theatrical performance, the curtain conceals a flurry of activity between acts, as one world of painted backdrops, furniture, rigging, and props is replaced by a new one by stagehands during intermission, away from the audience’s gaze.
By focusing on these moments of set change during intermission, Leylâ Gediz reveals the underlying structures of fiction and theatrical stage construction as metaphors to question our everyday sense of reality.
The first act of STAGEHAND was held at THE PILL, Istanbul between the dates 21 September - 10 November 2024 and focused on the backstage activities in the theater, such as the setting up scenery, lights, sound, props, rigging, and special effects for a production. Spanning several exhibitions, Gediz's Stagehand functions as a conceptual gesture that folds the passage of time into theatrical acts, opening a translational space between painting and performance. Leylâ Gediz approaches painting as a thought process and discursive practice to explore therelationship between figuration and its conditions of possibility. Her process-oriented practice incorporates fragments of everyday life filtered through contemporary image-processing technologies. Her paintings are structural experiments that dislocate and re-articulate the relationship between background and figure, simultaneously deconstructing painting into its constitutive materials and processes and re-articulating it through techniques of assemblage.