Colour Deers 2026: Istanbul’s Painting Workshop for the Untalented Opens Its 9th Exhibition

Yeteneksizler İçin Resim Atölyesi — Istanbul’s Painting Workshop for the Untalented — marks its fifth year with its 9th exhibition, Renk Geyikleri 2026 (Colour Deers 2026). The show opens on Saturday, 13 June at 18:00 at Azarnegari Art House, Maçka Talimyeri Sokak No:2, Beşiktaş, Istanbul, and runs until 28 June 2026.

For five years at Yeteneksizler İçin Resim Atölyesi, we have been trying to understand that painting is much more than a technical skill — it is an encounter: an encounter in which we give voice, through authentic construction, to what exists around us, from the most everyday to the most political; in which we bring things back into being through a language of images and open them to dialogue. And through that dialogue, an encounter with the meanings we ourselves produce — this time seen through others’ eyes.

We treat technique not merely as a tool to be learned, but as a process interwoven with thought and lived experience.

We try, as much as possible, to move beyond the labels and fixed meanings attached to all our encounters in life — even the emotional ones — to experience what they truly represent, to pass through those meanings, and to approach reality as closely as we can.

In the lives we live — where colours are most political, where we are suffocated, pressed, and subjected to pressure because what is inside us is something others want to possess — wherever we are in the world, we try to set our desires freely into circulation.

We try to strip the colours that have been taken from us — colours we have been made to lose by being fixed to a single hue — of all their imposed meanings, and to pass through even our darkest colours to find our own rainbow within, to see our own tones.

The point here is not to draw correctly or to reproduce given realities — it is to be able to wander in the distance between what is seen and what is merely thought to be seen. Because a person’s relationship with the world is not built on measures of “how beautiful it turned out” or “how realistically it was drawn.”

This is precisely where we struggle most in the workshop. Because the aesthetics of mediocrity is one of the most invisible and most powerful channels through which politics seeps in.

First we look. Then we try to peel what we see away from ready-made interpretations. Then we reconstruct it in our own terms. And then, through the work we make, we generate an entirely different language — shared but wordless — with everyone who looks at it.

For five years at Yeteneksizler İçin Resim Atölyesi we have been trying to learn this language. Perhaps our own mother tongues. A shared language — independent of one another, yet capable of being understood by one another.

On this endless individual journey, we build a composition from our own colours and re-weave our relationship with those who look at our work on the same surface. And in building this dialogue, we do not neglect the language of geyik — the playful, wandering banter of our age. (In Turkish, geyik means both “deer” and, colloquially, lighthearted irreverence — and Renk Geyikleri embraces both meanings fully.)

Today we live in a time when every kind of lack is being filled with achievement, performance, and material accumulation; when it grows harder for a person to remain in contact with their own emptiness. In a world that has lost its connection to air and grown rigid, colours are becoming more political than ever.

We, however, tried to fill our lack only with colours. Not to close it over. But to live alongside it. To be able to orbit around it, and from within that emptiness to draw new forms, new encounters, and new colours. Perhaps to keep alive the possibility of meeting beneath a rainbow that overflows gender, identity, and every ready-made definition.

That is why we call out again from the same place:

From lack.
From insufficiency.
From being untalented!

This Year’s Graduate: Nalan Özçete

This year’s graduating artist, Nalan Özçete (@nalan_ozcete), presents two acrylic-on-canvas works. For five years she never wavered from her focus on flowers and the things that make us feel good. In her professional life she is a respected specialist and educator in addiction, projective testing, and psychodrama — yet in the workshop she never once lectured anyone. While working, while talking, she walked hand in hand with the rest of the group with the openness of a primary school child. She has given a great deal to Yeteneksizler İçin Resim Atölyesi through her love and belief in it. On 13 June, at the opening, she will throw her graduation cap.

The exhibition poster features a work by Sevtap Sağlam (@instasevtap).

Opening Night & Live Auction

The opening reception begins at 18:00. From 19:00 onwards, Murat Harput (@baymuratharput) will host a live auction on Instagram via @aycasenbaskan. Works will be brought down from the walls, sent through open bidding into new lives — and the exhibition’s costs covered along the way. A little colour. A little geyik. A little music. Plenty of conversation.

Exhibition	Renk Geyikleri 2026 — Yeteneksizler İçin Resim Atölyesi (9th Exhibition)
Venue	Azarnegari Art House — Maçka Talimyeri Sok. No:2, Beşiktaş / Istanbul
Dates	13–28 June 2026
Opening	Saturday 13 June, 18:00
Live Auction	13 June from 19:00 — @aycasenbaskan (Instagram Live) / Host: @baymuratharput