Awita New York Studio isn’t a rental-wall gallery. Founded in 2023 by Turkish artist and curator Gulsum Keskinoglu, it’s grown into an international hub for emerging and independent artists. Part gallery, part community, with its own art magazine and a jury seat within the International Association of Art.

Out of significantly more submissions, 25 artists were selected for this show.
This is the one that made the cut: a hotel room lit by one warm lamp and one cold window, a woman mid-scroll on her phone, plaid pajamas, and cold night in Chicago.

Shot on a 20 mm lens, which explains the pull. Wide enough to catch the whole room without stepping back, close enough that the lamp still feels like it’s a few inches from the frame. The blue spilling in from the curtain fights the amber of the lamp for the whole shot, and Fuji’s X-Tra 400 renders both without picking a side.

On the pier at Kınalıada — the smallest of the Princes' Islands, a short ferry ride from the chaos of the city, someone had discarded refrigerators. Doors hanging open, appliances left to face the water like they were waiting for a ferry of their own.

I chose this frame as a stand-in for unpredictability itself. Not staged, not composed around a concept, just an object completely out of place, doing nothing, meaning nothing, and somehow saying everything about how strange a familiar place
can turn the moment you actually look at it.

The print traveled from a pier on a small island near Istanbul to a gallery in Batumi.
Hung among work from dozens of artists across the world, in a large-scale international group exhibition where your work ends up a few feet from a religious icon painting on one side and an architectural study on the other, and somehow it all holds together anyway.

A merchant’s hand cart — the kind vendors around the Grand Bazaar use to haul mid-sized loads through streets too narrow and too old for anything with an engine. One kid pushing, one kid riding, both grinning at a stranger with a camera like they’d been caught mid-joke.

In a neighborhood this historic, there’s no lots of playgrounds. No mart, no fenced-off play area — just whatever’s actually on the street. So the street becomes the toy. A cart built for merchandise becomes a ride. The frame is a straight downward angle, shadows stretched long across the pavement, sunlight doing all the work a studio setup usually has to fake.

This is what "ever after" actually looks like most days. Not a resolution, not a wedding, not a moral. Just two kids finding more joy in a borrowed cart than most kids find in a screen. Submitted to an exhibition built around fairy-tale endings, this frame argued for a smaller, truer one: happiness doesn’t need a plot, a budget, or a playground. It just needs a street and someone to share it with.

A fairy tale needs an ending, and this exhibition asked over 30 international artists what theirs actually looks like. Six-month online programme, backed by fashion and lifestyle brands, curated around a single question dressed up as a children’s book.

A bare tree, a blank blue sky, a field of construction debris and a torn blue tarp. In the middle of it — a man on a plastic chair, phone to his ear, sitting in what will eventually be his front yard.

Nothing here is finished.
The tree hasn't leafed out yet. The house is still scaffolding and rubble.
The chair is the only actually functional object in the frame.
But he's already sitting there, already occupying a space that technically
doesn't exist as a home yet — claiming it before it's built.

This is a photograph about the gap between where you are and where you're going.
It was just a Tuesday on a construction site, someone waiting for a life to finish arriving.