Rrrrivers, 2021 (Solo)
Bilsart, İstanbul, Turkey
04 - 14 August 2021

In this meditative single-channel video installation, Esra Gülmen continues her exploration of language, form, and perception through the lens of her earlier work Mountains, Trees, Rivers, Clouds, Waves (2021). The video focuses on a single word: Rrrrivers—a textual and visual echo of flowing water.

Shot along the Spree River in Berlin, the film captures the moment Gülmen releases a large sheet of paper bearing the word rrrrivers onto the canal’s surface. The paper floats calmly downstream as the camera follows its movement in real time. The ambient sound of a sunny Berlin day—distant voices, birds, passing bicycles—grounds the piece in lived experience, inviting viewers to slow down and enter a state of observation.

With subtle humor and poetic restraint, Gülmen invites the viewer to consider materiality, temporality, and the quiet synchronicity between word and world. Water and paper—two transient, fragile elements—interact in a process of dissolution. But does anything truly disappear? Or does it simply transform, carried onward by the current?

Rrrrivers (2021) becomes a gentle yet pointed reflection on impermanence, language, and the desire to harmonize with the passage of time—without needing it all to make perfect sense.

Rrrrivers, 2021
Single-channel video installation
2:21 minutes