Most of us have, at sometime or another, sent someone a heart emoji in a text. When you used that symbol, you sent someone an icon that Anatolian weavers were arranging into patterns long before anyone imagined a screen. The difference here is that rather than a tap and swipe motion, the weaver would have needed a loom, several weeks and a very steady count of warp threads. Fırat Neziroğlu has built an exhibition around that overlap, and In Between has now arrived at C24 Gallery in Chelsea, New York.
Fırat Neziroğlu In Between, 2026 Handwoven textile (FN Technique). Installation, monofilament, wool, cotton, peace silk.
A kilim has always been a way of writing without paper. Its motifs carried meanings a household could read at a glance, among them love, protection, separation and hope, and Neziroğlu treats that vocabulary as a living one. His question is what happens to the stories we weave into cloth when we now squeeze them into icons and images on glass. The works in the show sit in the gap between the two, and the title does the same job.
Fırat Neziroğlu Fate, 2026 Handwoven textile. Installation, monofilament, wool, cotton, peace silk.
The making is where it gets interesting for anyone who has ever stood at a loom. Neziroğlu builds a woven framework from fishing line, which lets him leave deliberate openings in the cloth. Threads behave like pencil marks in a drawing, and the empty space around them becomes part of the picture, catching light and throwing shadow in a medium usually considered flat. Kilim compositions have rarely been asked to do that. His years as a dancer seem to show in the results, since gesture and rhythm travel through the images the way they might through a body crossing a stage.
Fırat Neziroğlu River, 2015 Handwoven textile. Installation, monofilament, wool, cotton, peace silk.
His subjects come from daily life in Istanbul, where he is based: the people and objects he lives alongside, rendered in portraits of remarkable detail. Each work carries a title that tells a story, so a viewer can return to a piece they thought they understood and find a second reading waiting. Commissions have taken him as far as London, where he once wove a portrait of the Queen for her birthday, and his work has passed through the salerooms of Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but the everyday remains his starting point.
Fırat Neziroğlu In the Closet, 2023 Handwoven textile (FN Technique). Monofilament, wool, cotton, linen, fabric fragments.
Away from the studio he spends time with weaving communities across Türkiye, researching techniques and looms that are close to disappearing and helping bring them back into use. It means his contemporary pieces rest on practical knowledge of how these cloths were actually made, down to the machines that made them. Anyone who loves a hand-built loom will understand why that matters.
Weaving has often been filed under heritage, something to admire behind glass. In Between makes a persuasive case that it remains one of the most patient ways we have of recording what a life felt like, which makes it a fair match for a world that sends its feelings as tiny pictures.
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Further Information:
In Between: Fırat Neziroğlu is on show at the C24 Gallery in Chelsea, New York until December 23 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Fırat Neziroğlu Mirror, 2026 Handwoven textile (FN Technique). Installation, monofilament, wool, cotton, peace silk.
All further images as credited in captions.