March 10–31, 2026

Organized in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey and the Hacettepe University Institute of Fine Arts, this juried art exhibition is open to students enrolled in the master's and artistic proficiency programs affiliated with the Hacettepe University Institute of Fine Arts. Bringing together productions from different disciplines, it aims to offer a multi-layered reading space that aligns with the interdisciplinary nature of the concept of liminality. Different forms of expression, such as painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphics, photography, video, performance, and new media, open up a discussion on the physical, spatial, temporal, and symbolic dimensions of the state after the threshold.

The exhibition will be on display at the Arif Hikmet Koyunoğlu Exhibition Hall of the Ankara State Museum of Painting and Sculpture from March 10 to 31, 2026. The relationship it will establish with the museum's historical and cultural memory aims to reinforce the themes of transition, transformation, and repositioning in the spatial plane. Furthermore, the collaboration between the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey and the Hacettepe University Institute of Fine Arts aims to establish a strong link between academic production and public cultural institutions. This collaboration expands the field of art education by making the works of young artists visible in a historical and institutional space such as a museum. At the same time, it contributes to the continuity and pluralistic development of art by creating a mutual interaction between the university's contemporary and experimental productions and the museum's cultural memory.

After the Threshold proposes an exhibition framework centered on the ambiguous, fragile, and yet unsettled states of existence that arise following the completion of a transitional phase. Drawing upon the concept of rites of passage as formulated by Arnold van Gennep and further developed through the notion of liminality by Victor Turner, the exhibition focuses on the “after” in which an individual or community, having detached from a former status, attempts to inhabit a new position.

In rites of passage, the liminal phase denotes an in-between realm where definitions are suspended, identities become ambiguous, and hierarchies temporarily dissolve. After the Threshold, however, interrogates the condition that emerges once this intermediate phase is presumed to have concluded: Is reintegration truly possible? Is the new status more stable than the former, or more fragile? Has the transformation been completed, or does the liminal state persist in altered forms?

As Victor Turner suggests, the liminal subject is “neither here nor there,” positioned outside the boundaries of law, custom, and social classification. This exhibition seeks to render visible precisely the process that follows such outsideness. What emerges after the threshold may involve the construction of a new identity, the permanent loss of belonging, or a sustained condition of in-betweenness. In this context, the exhibition emphasizes that transformation is associated not only with hope and rebirth, but also with loss, uncertainty, alienation, and vulnerability.

After the Threshold is thus conceived as a site of encounter that proposes a reconsideration of individual and collective transformations through contemporary art practices, making visible the uncertainties that continue to persist at the point where transition is assumed to have been completed.