The Long Lasting Intimacy of Strangers : A Prologue

T H E  P I L L ® is thrilled to announce THE LONG LASTING INTIMACY OF STRANGERS: A PROLOGUE, the first exhibition in a series that retraces a decade of exhibitions, encounters, displacements, and forms of relation.

The title is borrowed from the eponymous book The Long Lasting Intimacy of Strangers, encompassing a seminal essay by writer and curator Asli Seven and published by T H E P I L L ® and JBE Books on the occasion of the gallery’s tenth anni- versary. The publication, to be released during Art Basel Paris, extends the exhibition’s inquiry into the gallery’s recent history, following the publication New Art Scales, which addressed T H E P I L L ’s first five years. 

THE LONG LASTING INTIMACY OF STRANGERS: A PROLOGUE returns to Istanbul — the point of departure for a tra- jectory that has since extended to Paris. Rather than reconstructing a chronological history, the exhibition approaches the gallery as a constellation of relationships: between strangers, generations, cities, bodies, histories, and forms of knowledge.

At its core is the notion of intimacy among strangers, borrowed from Lynn Margulis via Donna Haraway, to describe en- dosymbiosis as a generative condition of becoming-with. Distinct organisms do not simply coexist; through prolonged proximity, contamination, and exchange, they produce new forms of life. Intimacy, in this sense, is neither given nor synonymous with identification. It is an achievement of time, friction, and sustained difference.

This proposition offers a way of reading T H E P I L L ® itself: not as a fixed container, but as a moving vessel. Since its foun- dation, the gallery has operated across shifting geographies and temporalities, gathering practices and people from different shores and allowing them to enter into provisional forms of relation. The opening of T H E P I L L ® Paris in 2024 is understood within this trajectory not simply as an expansion, but as another movement within a longer diasporic geo- graphy between Istanbul and Paris. 

The second conceptual axis is contained in the gallery’s name itself: the pill as molecular architecture.

A pill enters the body and alters its internal organization. It acts through absorption, modulation, and delay. It occupies the threshold between autonomy and regulation, the biological and the political, the intimate and the infrastructural. From contraception and hormonal transition to psychiatric treatment and viral suppression, the pill names a history of the self-engineered body—and the political transformations that follow when biology ceases to function as an unques- tioned destiny.

T H E P I L L ® proposes the gallery in analogous terms: as an apparatus that is not simply inhabited but absorbed; a space whose effects accumulate through encounter. Its exhibitions operate less as discrete statements than as temporary che- mistries of bodies, images, materials, and ideas. 

The artists brought together in THE LONG LASTING INTIMACY OF STRANGERS: A PROLOGUE inhabit this field of trans- formation through distinct formal and political vocabularies. Soufiane Ababri, Mireille Blanc, Berke Doğanoğlu, Leylâ Gediz, Cem Örgen, Nefeli Papadimouli, Elsa Sahal, and Ugo Schiavi engage, across different generations and practices, with questions of embodiment, desire, displacement, memory, materiality, technology, and collective experience.

Their proximity does not propose a common nor a stable identity. Instead, it stages a temporary ecology in which diffe- rence remains productive. Bodies become porous; histories become layered; objects carry memories between places; individual and collective forms of life continually negotiate their boundaries.

In this sense, THE LONG LASTING INTIMACY OF STRANGERS: A PROLOGUE does not commemorate ten years so much as ask what ten years of sustained relation might produce.

The exhibition begins with a gallery, but its subject is relation itself: how forms of intimacy can persist without collapsing difference; how continuity can exist without closure; and how an institution might remain mobile while continuing to gather.

THE LONG LASTING INTIMACY OF STRANGERS: A PROLOGUE

T H E P I L L ®, Istanbul 2026 

Artists:

Soufiane Ababri
Mireille Blanc
Berke Doğanoğlu
Leylâ Gediz

Cem Örgen
Nefeli Papadimouli
Elsa Sahal
Ugo Schiavi

Publication:

The Long Lasting Intimacy of Strangers Published by THE PILL and JBE Books Released during Art Basel Paris, 2026