Cemre Yeşil Gönenli

I Want to Always Be With You contemplates sleep as a way of coming to terms with death’s silent finality. This body of work forms a quiet dialogue between a father and a daughter, carried across time through photography.

The series brings together photographs that were never meant to coexist: images
taken by the artist’s father and printed in a darkroom in the 1970s, photographs made by the artist herself in the 2020s, and material from the family archive. These images become a transgenerational dream sequence.

The work lingers on the paradox of primal love and pain within a family. It holds
space to confront the silence that follows estrangement between parents and children, and the aftermath of death. This deeply intimate work stems from her father’s passing from an aortic rupture and her brother’s escape from the same fate.

Boyhood emerges here as a form of legacy—a masculine love between fathers and
sons, where power struggles echo across generations. Rather than seeking resolution, the work is about holding on and letting go at the same time, about learning to live with death’s quiet finality.

Light keeps time.

Darkness holds bodies.

A bed remembers what photographs cannot.

Here, nothing is resolved.