Femtensesse is pleased to present Seeing Touch, a solo exhibition by Damla Kilickiran. With a profound sensitivity to materials, Kilickiran works primarily with industrial substances, transforming them into vessels for embodied and esoteric inquiry.

Seeing Touch takes the form of a site-specific installation in which the gallery windows are covered with XPS boards, a construction material typically used for façade insulation. The panels are carved with motifs on one side, allowing an experimental iconographic landscape to emerge, revealed through the shifting temporality of sunlight. During the day, Femtensesse appears from the outside as a construction site clad in insulation material. At night, the installation is illuminated from within, revealing a reversed image to passersby.

For several years, Kilickiran worked in a hospital archiving and digitizing X-ray images. This experience sparked a fascination with the inner world, shifting from something abstract and inaccessible to something perceptible, sensorial, and potentially public—where the body becomes increasingly indeterminate, constantly changing in porosity, location, and form. This sensibility carries into the installation, where the panels hold and transmit imagery drawn from the artist’s photographic archive. Motifs include ornaments from the Temple of Hekate in Lagina, Turkey; Asya Turgeneva’s window works at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland; a scorpion striking a glass-encased heart; a cross; eyes on a façade weeping glyphs; and graphene at quantum scales. 

The panels consist of extruded polystyrene with nickel-titanium embedded in the cellular structure, producing the characteristic pale yellow tone of the material and used for moisture resistance and various thermal properties. In Seeing Touch, the cellular structure within the insulation material is amplified as a latent image-forming layer. Through a painterly approach to industrial material, Kilickiran allows the pigments inherent in the construction boards to merge with the motifs, like alchemical fossilizations of a sacred momentum in which matter is not stable; it is flow itself.

Damla Kilickiran (b. 1991, Stockholm) is a Swedish-Turkish artist who lives and works in Oslo. She holds an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and a BFA from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Semantically threaded, like prayers, Hulias, Oslo (2025); Mercury RX, Mega Foundation, Stockholm (2022); Twine an Image That Is Yet To Be, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2022); Among Spirits of Mineral Pitch and Other Public Apparitions, UKS, Oslo (2021); On Sense and Glyphs, Destiny’s, Oslo (2020); and Purpur Glimpse, Small Projects, Tromsø (2017). Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at Femtensesse, Oslo (2025); Sandefjord Kunstforening (2025); Lunds konsthall (2024/2025); The 8th Yokohama Triennale (2024); Gothenburg International Biennale For Contemporary Art (2021); Lofoten International Art Festival, Svolvær (2019); and Nordnorsk Kunstnersenter, Svolvær (2018). Commissioned by KORO – Public Art Norway, Kilickiran recently completed a public artwork for the façade of A-blokka, part of the new Government Quarter in Oslo. The reliefs, produced in glass fiber–reinforced concrete, draw on her photographic archive of subtle urban details and overlooked forms. Her work is currently included in the group exhibition Pyramide at Haugar kunstmuseum in Tønsberg. In June, her installation On Sense and Glyphs will be presented by Femtensesse at Basel Social Club, followed by a solo exhibition at KOSA in Maridalen in the fall. 2027 will see a solo exhibition by Kilickiran in one of the skylit galleries at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo.

This exhibition is kindly supported by Arts Council Norway.