SANATORIUM presents Mehmet Dere’s solo exhibition 21:21 from February 18 to March 28, 2026. Bringing together the artist’s recent works inspired by the number 21 and its cultural, mythological, and esoteric meanings, the exhibition offers a critical perspective on contemporary socioeconomic issues through the use of game-like forms.
Dere approaches the number 21 as a threshold where personal experiences, historical narratives, and social reality meet. His practice elaborates on the highly charged relations between the common images of daily life and current political and economic structures. Practices such as games and numbers that are frequently encountered in everyday life are transformed into critical tools, exposing systems producing value, power, and inequality. Dere’s works create an open-ended space for thought, inviting viewers to navigate thresholds and points of rupture.
Structured around the number 21, the exhibition establishes a conceptual numerical framework through which Dere translates the symbolic associations of 3 and 7 into his works via formal and notional relationships. The symbolic meanings of numbers played a transformative role in mythology, religion, and esoteric systems of thought since the earliest periods of human history. Within this context, the number 21 has been associated across various cultural and spiritual traditions with ideas of completion, thresholds, and transformation; it has been read not merely as a mathematical value but as a symbol suggesting cosmic and inner processes. In esoteric interpretations, understood as the product of triadic wholeness (body, mind, spirit) and the sevenfold cycle (time, cosmic order, universal rhythm), this number is conceived as numerical expression of spiritual integration.
Dere weaves this multilayered symbolic background together with his own lived experience and the economic realities of the 21st century. 21 becomes both a subjective threshold and a conceptual tool for reflecting on the pledges, expectations, and persistent obscurities of contemporary capitalism. Questioning the individual’s position within economic systems through the tension between luck and mechanisms of control, the artist develops a distinctive typographic and image-based repertoire that translates this tension into visual language.
In Dere’s practice, play does not signify entertainment but rather points to systems governed by predetermined rules in which winners and losers are frequently assigned through invisible mechanisms. Concepts such as chance, coincidence, and repetition become metaphors for examining the individual’s position within socioeconomic orders. In this sense, Dere’s playing field appears as an allegory of a system played out on the field but lost at the table. Discarded playing cards and scratch-card surfaces covered with pastoral landscapes gesture toward the game board of an economic system reduced to a single goal. These idealized scenes emerge as mute images of a neutered landscape of Turkey, constructing a representational field that renders invisible a system in which nature and labor are systematically consumed, masked by an aesthetic of hope and expectation. The tension between the rule-based structure of play and the randomness it contains forms the exhibition’s central dynamic. While these surfaces signal the transformation of economic systems into arenas of play, they also make visible the states of individual anticipation, waiting, and hope shaped within them, generating a shared experience and atmosphere throughout the exhibition space.
21:21 is understood beyond a universal symbol with a fixed meaning, instead emerging as a circulating state of mind that signals transition, incompleteness, and the possibility of transformation. Oscillating between anxiety and hope, this threshold constructs an atmosphere that intensifies the tension between individual experience and socioeconomic structures, inviting the audience to become part of this open-ended space.
About the artist:
About the artist:
Mehmet Dere was born in 1979 in İzmir. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Painting Department at Dokuz Eylül University. He completed his MA in the same faculty and completed his PhD at the Faculty of Arts and Design, Painting Department, Sakarya University. The language that the artist creates in his work exists in many (sociological-psychological) layers that touch one another. The conceptual framework of Dere’s early works exists in a political area and deals with the socio-political history of Turkey, its multi-culturalism, identity and creating multi-vocality in terms of belonging and cultural democratization. In terms of form, Dere generally produces installations through which he can reach the whole from smaller parts. He uses objects, photos, charcoal patterns and installations to create a personal archive (narrative). Also, he creates objects based on social memory and senses and works on video. In his own words, Dere likes to collect “invisible stories” while creating his works. For the artist, a whole is travelling in time composed of small episodes. He constantly feeds his work this way in their reckoning with and creating reality. Deriving from Turkey’s cultural history, his works consist of a series of ironic and upfront constructions focusing on local and social memory research. While the artist builds his work with the retrieved images of the cultural memory, he poetically includes his own subjectivity to all these captivities. Issues of social injustice, resistance and politics of survival are raised not through the artist’s observation as an outsider but from close range, a perspective precisely constructed by the practices of life. This stance, at times tragicomic, and at times built upon the relationship of patience and suffering, is tackled to be presented to the audience repeatedly, uninterrupted, and almost prayer-like. Looking at Turkey’s cultural history while focused on memory, individual and social identity research, the recent work shows an abstract trend towards poetic lyricism fed by internal reality.
The artist opened his first solo exhibitions in 49A which he founded. He is also a longtime K2 Contemporary Art Center member in İzmir and has participated in numerous group exhibitions at the center. Additionally, Dere has participated in “When Ideas Become Crime” curated by Halil Altındere at the Tütün Deposu in 2010; “Port İzmir 2, Silence Storm, International Contemporary Art Triennial”; and the “I am Here, The Time is Now” exhibition at Rotterdam curated by Ong Keng Sen and sponsored by the European Culture Fund in 2008. He was awarded a special prize at the “27th Contemporary Artists Exhibition” at Akbank Art Beyoğlu. In 2007, he participated in the special project realized at Santral İstanbul in the scope of the 10th İstanbul Biennial. The artist’s first comprehensive solo exhibition, titled “Quid rides? De te fabula narratur.” organized at Rampa, consists of a series of ironic and upfront constructs focusing on local and social memory research deriving from Turkey’s cultural history. Apart from his artist identity, Dere continues his academic studies as a lecturer at Istanbul Topkapı University Plato Vocational School Graphic Design Program.
