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Cevdet Erek
28.02.2026 — 26.07.2026Cevdet Erek
Ꜵccident GROTESQUE
Cevdet Erek
28.02.2026 — 26.07.2026Cevdet Erek
Cevdet Erek
Ꜵccident Grotesque
Ꜵccident Grotesque is a large-scale solo exhibition by Istanbul-based artist Cevdet Erek. For this exhibition, Erek transforms the former American embassy building (1959), designed by architect Marcel Breuer, into an installation in which rhythm and architecture attune. For Erek, rhythm is not merely a musical concept but a way of perceiving the world — a means of connecting space, time, and movement.
The exhibition title, ‘Ꜵccident Grotesque’, is written with a custom character that merges the letters ‘o’ and ‘a’, allowing its pronunciation to shift between vowel sounds resulting in ‘accident’ and ‘occident’, the second one referring to the setting of the sun and to the west, historically understood as a counterpart to the Orient, that is, the east. These two words trace back to the Latin root ‘cadere’, which translates to ‘to fall’. For some, the title may recall Akzidenz Grotesk, one of the earliest sans-serif typefaces and a precursor to postwar German and Swiss modernist typography, from roughly the same period in which the American embassy building was built. The merged ‘oa’ form is not used in contemporary Latin-alphabets.
This exhibition presents a new work by Cevdet Erek, bearing the same title. The work develops ideas from recent projects by the artist, including ‘Rampa Rítmica’ (2025) at the 36th São Paulo Biennial, where a short, shared duration was divided in twelve different ways and distributed along the external ramp structure of Oscar Niemeyer’s Biennial pavilion, through loudspeakers, and appeared as a visual score on a large banner placed on the façade. At West, two new twin sequencers built in collaboration with The Hague based instrument maker and creative-coder Rob Bothof generate and display a timing structure that is spread across the offices of the former embassy. Twelve rooms per floor correspond to twelve different time signatures within the same duration. The installation recalls the Wurlitzer Sideman, one of the first commercially available drum machines produced in the same years as the construction of the building, using present day commercially available percussion samples of Sideman, that echo its mechanical rhythms. Occasionally when the windows open, the sequences inside the rooms extend outward and connect the interior timing structure to the façade and the public domain outside.
‘Day’ (2014) consists of a linear LED display that tracks the minutes of daylight for each day of an exhibition, with one LED corresponding to one minute. The work runs on timing set for a previous presentation. It pulses from right to left, reversing the conventional left-to-right direction associated with reading and with that, many visual displays of time.
In the building’s basement, Erek presents ‘Fluctuations of Raw Techno Material’ (2024), originally made for the inclined shaft of a former Soviet heat and power plant that now houses EKKM, the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn. Sound sources circulate through the space, forming a rotating field of rhythmic units that approach and recede from a relatively fixed position of the listener and draw on sonic materials associated with industrial techno.
Biography
Cevdet Erek (1974, Istanbul, Turkey) studied architecture at Mimar Sinan University for Fine Arts and Sound Engineering & Design at Istanbul Technical University’s Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM). He was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2005 – 2006). Erek is co-founder of the experimental band Nekropsi. He has participated in major international exhibitions, including dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, 2012), and the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) representing Türkiye. His work has also been presented at numerous institutions such as MUAC (Mexico City, 2017), M HKA, (Antwerp, 2018), The Art Institute of Chicago (2019), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2019, 2024-) and Secession (Vienna, 2025). Erek is professor at Istanbul Technical University, TMDK and ITU MIAM in Istanbul.
Ꜵccident Grotesque
Open
28.02.2026 — 26.07.2026
Opening
28.02.2026, 19:00 — 24:00
Location
West Den Haag in the former American Embassy, Lange Voorhout 102, The Hague
Ꜵccident Grotesque is a large-scale solo exhibition by Istanbul-based artist Cevdet Erek. For this exhibition, Erek transforms the former American embassy building (1959), designed by architect Marcel Breuer, into an installation in which rhythm and architecture attune. For Erek, rhythm is not merely a musical concept but a way of perceiving the world — a means of connecting space, time, and movement.
The exhibition title, ‘Ꜵccident Grotesque’, is written with a custom character that merges the letters ‘o’ and ‘a’, allowing its pronunciation to shift between vowel sounds resulting in ‘accident’ and ‘occident’, the second one referring to the setting of the sun and to the west, historically understood as a counterpart to the Orient, that is, the east. These two words trace back to the Latin root ‘cadere’, which translates to ‘to fall’. For some, the title may recall Akzidenz Grotesk, one of the earliest sans-serif typefaces and a precursor to postwar German and Swiss modernist typography, from roughly the same period in which the American embassy building was built. The merged ‘oa’ form is not used in contemporary Latin-alphabets.
This exhibition presents a new work by Cevdet Erek, bearing the same title. The work develops ideas from recent projects by the artist, including ‘Rampa Rítmica’ (2025) at the 36th São Paulo Biennial, where a short, shared duration was divided in twelve different ways and distributed along the external ramp structure of Oscar Niemeyer’s Biennial pavilion, through loudspeakers, and appeared as a visual score on a large banner placed on the façade. At West, two new twin sequencers built in collaboration with The Hague based instrument maker and creative-coder Rob Bothof generate and display a timing structure that is spread across the offices of the former embassy. Twelve rooms per floor correspond to twelve different time signatures within the same duration. The installation recalls the Wurlitzer Sideman, one of the first commercially available drum machines produced in the same years as the construction of the building, using present day commercially available percussion samples of Sideman, that echo its mechanical rhythms. Occasionally when the windows open, the sequences inside the rooms extend outward and connect the interior timing structure to the façade and the public domain outside.
‘Day’ (2014) consists of a linear LED display that tracks the minutes of daylight for each day of an exhibition, with one LED corresponding to one minute. The work runs on timing set for a previous presentation. It pulses from right to left, reversing the conventional left-to-right direction associated with reading and with that, many visual displays of time.
In the building’s basement, Erek presents ‘Fluctuations of Raw Techno Material’ (2024), originally made for the inclined shaft of a former Soviet heat and power plant that now houses EKKM, the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn. Sound sources circulate through the space, forming a rotating field of rhythmic units that approach and recede from a relatively fixed position of the listener and draw on sonic materials associated with industrial techno.
Biography
Cevdet Erek (1974, Istanbul, Turkey) studied architecture at Mimar Sinan University for Fine Arts and Sound Engineering & Design at Istanbul Technical University’s Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM). He was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2005 – 2006). Erek is co-founder of the experimental band Nekropsi. He has participated in major international exhibitions, including dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, 2012), and the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) representing Türkiye. His work has also been presented at numerous institutions such as MUAC (Mexico City, 2017), M HKA, (Antwerp, 2018), The Art Institute of Chicago (2019), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2019, 2024-) and Secession (Vienna, 2025). Erek is professor at Istanbul Technical University, TMDK and ITU MIAM in Istanbul.