THE PILL®

THE PILL® was founded in 2016 by Suela J. Cennet in the historical peninsula of Istanbul by the Golden Horn to operate both as a global platform and a mobile vessel for trans-local and trans-disciplinary contemporary art. By creating new process-sensitive infrastructures for artistic collaboration, experimentation and critical dialogue anchored in the region, the gallery strives to foster cosmopolitanism and to amplify local voices beyond the dialectic of center and periphery.

Located at the ground floor of an ancient generator factory, the exhibition space lends itself to constant architectural transformation, evolving together with both solo and curated artistic propositions. Initially imagined as a mobile naval project space by its founder, the gallery’s programming is strongly inspired by the history and ideas of utopia in modernism ranging from scales of architecture to those of displacement and dispossession, through molecular shifts at the level of the bodies and new affective articulations as reflected in contemporary artistic production. Fully embracing the meanings encapsulated within the gallery’s name, in Suela J. Cennet’s words, “the pill evokes both the relationship to truth and fiction as in The Matrix, as well as the foundational discovery of female contraception which marked a definitive anthropological break leading up to contemporary issues surrounding the self-engineered body. Both carry an emancipation whose validity we continue to question today”.