Misra Balkan
Mountains got me tipsy last night

Exhibition opening at ARV.International: Stefan Karadzha 35th, Vishovgrad

Colorful squares spread across the surface, sketching out seemingly innocent boundaries. Separation and union meet only along a trembling thread, where every opposite is caught in the other, holding on without knowing to which side they will roll over.

At moments, a faint scent of soil drifts through—like the quiet promise before a thunder. Much like a rainbow waiting for rain to appear, this earthy breath carries a whisper of renewal, and the dizzy anticipation of something just about to happen.

Layers of color pile up, not to hide but to play, inventing their own unruly game. The darkness and depth that emerge feel less like gloom than the reckless impatience of something young and curious, a childlike urge to topple the rules and tip the balance.

Mountains Got Me Tipsy Last Night follows a multi-layered dialogue built through stories. Like pieces of a forgotten puzzle, each element sways between togetherness and rupture. Forms drift in space like gestures caught mid-motion, but when they gather, they turn into abstract hieroglyphs—a language of glances and murmurs that needs no words to describe. Teetering between expansion and collapse, these images are swollen yet weightless, like a breath about to be released, or a mountain’s echo after a night of secret laughter.

Born from an endless conversation with nature, these imagined landscapes let the visible and the unseen, the hidden and the bold, share the same stage. Light and shadow, presence and emptiness dance in constant flux—refusing stillness, never complete, always a little tipsy.

Mısra Balkan (b. 1999) completed her undergraduate education in Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art in 2023. She is a visual artist based between Istanbul and Brighton, working across painting, drawing, and sculpture to explore the fragile interplay between individual experience and collective structures. Her practice creates vivid, layered compositions where tension and harmony coexist.

The rupture between personal narratives and social systems runs through her work. Small orders that seem coherent on their own begin to crack and shift when confronted with larger frameworks. Encounters often result in collision rather than calm—voices overlap, colors compete—yet this tension forms not chaos, but a complex and captivating whole.

Balkan’s first solo exhibition opens on 24 October 2025 at Büyükdere35 in Istanbul. Since graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 2023 with a BA in Painting and Printmaking, she has taken part in international residencies, and has exhibited in shows such as Together (Istanbul Artweeks), The Weird & The Eerie (New Glasgow Society), the Glasgow Art Club Winter Graduate Exhibition, İstikrarlı Hayaller (Meteor Gallery, Bursa), Phoebus Cartel (SaltSpace, Glasgow), and ENYA – Flos Collective Debut Exhibition (Glasgow).