ISTANBUL — In Cengiz Tekin’s 2012 {photograph} “Sand,” a person hangs an image of a sundown on the wall of a small, sparsely furnished room the place two spindly potted vegetation sit on a flooring lined with sand. Although the picture is at first look a poignant reflection on the human urge to carry a little bit of the pure world into the humblest city settings, it additionally has a darkish subtext. It invokes cost-cutting builders who allegedly combine sea sand into cement, leaving houses weak to lethal collapse through the earthquakes that regularly plague Turkey, in addition to the ecological harm of speedy urbanization and mass building.
Instead of this callous disregard for nature and its energy, the group exhibition States of Earth at Yapı Kredi Tradition and Arts in Istanbul — that includes Tekin and 10 different up to date artists, all however one in every of whom are from Turkey — asks whether or not artwork will help us discover methods of forging extra equitable, much less exploitative methods of coexisting with the setting.
Lots of the artists chosen by curators Burcu Çimen and Didem Yazıcı make the most of pure and recycled supplies of their work, suggesting that international change should begin at residence (or on this case, the studio). Hanging within the central atrium of the exhibition, Berna Dolmacı’s large-scale seascape “Foggy Blue” (2022), for instance, is collaged from scrap paper coloured with espresso, tea, henna, hibiscus, and different pure pigments.
Set up view of States of Matter with Berna Dolmacı’s “Foggy Blue” (2022) within the foreground
The place “Foggy Blue” is gentle and dreamlike, the boldly backlit set up of Rozelin Akgün’s “Pine (Patch)” (2024), a quilt of biomaterial squares produced from milk thistle (a typical weed) and food-based dyes, makes these modest supplies gleam like stained glass. An accompanying clarification of Akgün’s working course of and the significance of weeds alludes to the dangers of shedding conventional information about vegetation with out explicitly mentioning the assorted cultural and political pressures on the artist’s majority-Kurdish hometown of Diyarbakır, together with building within the historic Hevsel Gardens, the place she gathered her thistle vegetation.
Along with being extra ecologically sustainable, natural supplies additionally yield extra unpredictable outcomes, forcing the artist right into a place of collaborating with nature slightly than attempting to completely management it, as in Ekin Kano’s blown-glass sculpture “The Body Living Itself” (2019), which frequently evolves because of the micro organism and fungal flora rising inside its translucent vessel. One other work by Kano, “Worshiping Ancestors” (2019–24), preserves the microorganisms from cellulose waste beneath glass in a sequence of icon-like photographs, honoring the origin of all life, together with our personal.
Extra dystopian is the set up “New Extremophiles” (2024) by Buşra Tunç, who shapes plastic and polystyrene scraps into rock-like piles resembling a post-industrial slag-dump panorama interspersed with video screens on which polluted-looking water flows and small vegetation develop in rusty cans. Artist Sibel Horada, in the meantime, collects styrofoam and polyurethane fragments which have washed up on the shore of the island the place she lives, and makes use of them to construct stalactites, fungal formations, and imaginary constellations in her Formed by Water (2019–ongoing) sequence. The reuse of waste supplies is inventive, but additionally cautionary, conjuring up a future wherein synthetic simulacrums of nature could be all we have now left.
Set up view of Rozelin Akgün, “Pine (Patch)” (2024)
Set up view of Begüm Mütevellitoğlu, “Discover All the Beauties With Us” (2023)
Set up view of Ekin Kano, “Worshiping Ancestors” (2019–24)
States of Earth continues at Yapı Kredi Tradition and Arts (İstiklal Caddesi No:161, Beyoğlu, Istanbul, Turkey), by way of March 30. The exhibition was curated by Burcu Çimen and Didem Yazıcı.
