Pınar Yıldızhan
Pınar Yıldızhan was born in Ankara in 1984. She completed her undergraduate studies at Bilkent University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Design and Architecture, in the Department of Graphic Design. After working as a designer and news coordinator for the national publication Mag Magazine, she moved to New York. There, she completed her education in Image Consulting and Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).
Following an internship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), she returned to Turkey. While continuing her work as a freelance designer, her background in a family of collectors led her to manage the family’s private art collection. She continues to specialize in sourcing the right artworks, selecting interrelated objects, discovering emerging artists, and managing acquisition processes.
Her desire to document and archive art collections led her to the Master’s program in Art History and Museum Studies at Başkent University, Institute of Social Sciences. She graduated in June 2022 after completing her thesis titled "Installation Art and Awareness in Contemporary Museum Studies."
Currently, she provides art consultancy services to established collectors and art enthusiasts looking to take their first steps into the world of collecting. In 2025, she completed the Contemporary Art and Curatorship seminar program organized in collaboration with Akbank Sanat and Open Dialogue Istanbul. She aims to continue her work in exhibition production and contemporary art research.
Beyond Repetition: Routines
The exhibition “Routines” invites viewers to rediscover everyday moments, suggesting that deep meaning often lies within the quietest gestures.
Human life is woven around small and silent repetitions. Every repeated action eventually becomes a part of an individual's identity, habits, and memory. From the specific way a cup of coffee is prepared every morning to choosing the same route home every evening, these routines shape our lives and imbue them with an invisible meaning. We only notice the existence of these repetitions when they are interrupted. It is exactly at this point that the "Routines" exhibition comes into play.
The "Routines" exhibition centers on these invisible repetitions that lie at the foundation of our daily lives. These routines are the cornerstones of our relationship with time, space, and the body. While a simple repeated movement can create a sense of comfort and security, it can also transform into a cycle that traps us. The exhibition explores this dual effect and reveals the meanings beneath ordinary actions.
Sociologist Erving Goffman describes daily life as a kind of "performance stage". The movements we repeat every day, the roles assigned to our bodies, and the objects we use determine our social relationships while shaping our identity. The works in this exhibition trace routines across a wide spectrum, ranging from physical movements to mental cycles, and from spatial habits to our relationships with objects.
Through various media and forms of expression, the artists interrogate repeated actions, forgotten objects, silent bodies, and daily habits. With works extending from anonymous movements in public spaces to invisible domestic labor, and from layers of memory created by mental repetitions to the cyclical movements of nature, the exhibition invites the audience to reconsider their own routines.
The exhibition presents the audience with not only the individual dimension of routines but also their social and cultural aspects. Actions that occur silently in the background of daily life are also carriers of a society's collective memory and cultural identity. Throughout the exhibition, these recurring movements and actions are reinterpreted through the diverse perspectives of the artists, uncovering the profound meanings beneath the banality of daily life.
The "Routines" exhibition offers viewers the opportunity to go beyond the ordinary moments of their lives, to rediscover them, and to give them meaning. Because life is sometimes hidden within the quietest, most ordinary-looking movements, and art makes this silence audible.