Nilbar Güreş is an Istanbul-born contemporary artist based between Istanbul, Vienna and Naples. Trained in painting at Marmara University and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she works across photography, video, performance, painting, sculpture, installation and textile-based collage. Her practice often begins with lived experience and uses staged situations, fabric, domestic objects and organic forms to examine gender roles, cultural identity and social injustice. Humour, tenderness and resistance coexist in images that make power relations visible without reducing her subjects to symbols.
In 2026, Güreş represents Türkiye at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia with A Kiss on the Eyes, curated by Başak Doğa Temür at the Arsenale. The pavilion brings together earlier works and large-scale sculptures and installations produced between December 2025 and March 2026 with craftspeople in Istanbul. Across sculpture, painting, video and mixed media, the presentation addresses migration, belonging, displacement, racism and discrimination while foregrounding care as a form of political strength.
The title translates a Turkish phrase expressing closeness without intrusion. The installation’s low, leaning, hanging and hovering forms ask visitors to negotiate distance, vulnerability and resistance. A Kiss on the Eyes remains on view in Venice from 9 May to 22 November 2026.