Make Your Mark Gallery
Kaasutehtaankatu 1, Rak. 6
00540 Helsinki
‘Behind The Letters, Between The Notes’
Kadir AMIGO Memis
Exhibition dates: 14.8.2026 – 30.8.2026
Make Your Mark Gallery, in collaboration with Flow Festival, presents Kadir Amigo Memiş’s first exhibition in Finland. Titled Behind The Letters, Between The Notes, the exhibition features unique works and silkscreen prints. The artist will hold an artist talk at the gallery on Saturday, August 15, 2026, at 17:00, discussing his work and process.
Born in 1974 in a small Anatolian village near Bilecik, Turkey, where he grew up herding sheep, Kadir “Amigo” Memiş moved to Berlin at age ten to join his parents, part of the first generation of Turkish Gastarbeiter. There he found breakdancing on the street and in 1993, with Vartan Bassil, founded the B-Boy crew Flying Steps, which went on to win multiple world breakdancing championships. He later became one of the first artists in Germany to fuse hip-hop with other traditions, developing Zeybreak, a style that merges breaking with zeybek, a folk dance from western Anatolia.
That same impulse to blur boundaries runs through his visual work. Memiş describes himself as an “urban nomad,” collecting gestures, lines, colours, and sounds from the cities he moves through and translating them onto paper. His drawings put calligraphy into direct conversation with graffiti, treating the line of a letterform the same way he treats the line of a body in motion, as something reaching for a form where intuition and reflection meet. For Memiş, there is no real separation between dance and drawing, performance and mark-making: both are ways of writing the body’s memory into space. Behind The Letters, Between The Notes takes its title from exactly this territory; the exhibition sits in the gap where language becomes gesture and rhythm becomes image, letters and notes both understood as scores for movement.
Behind The Letters, Between The Notes opens as part of Flow Festival on Friday, August 14, and continues after the festival until August 30. An admission ticket is required to enter the festival grounds during the festival.
Make Your Mark Gallery
Opening Times:
Mon–Fri 12:00 –19:00
Sat 11:00–16:00
Sun 12:00–16:00
During the festival:
Fri Aug 14, 16:00–21:30 (opening reception)
Sat Aug 15, 14:00–21:00 (artist talk at 17:00)
Sun Aug 16, 13:00–18:30
