ISTANBUL — In Cengiz Tekin’s 2012 photograph “Sand,” a man hangs a picture of a sunset on the wall of a small, sparsely furnished room where two spindly potted plants sit on a floor covered with sand. Though the image is at first glance a poignant reflection on the human urge to bring a bit of the natural world into the humblest urban settings, it also has a dark subtext. It invokes cost-cutting developers who allegedly mix sea sand into cement, leaving homes vulnerable to deadly collapse during the earthquakes that frequently plague Turkey, as well as the ecological damage of rapid urbanization and mass construction.
In place of this callous disregard for nature and its power, the group exhibition States of Earth at Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts in Istanbul — featuring Tekin and 10 other contemporary artists, all but one of whom are from Turkey — asks whether art can help us find ways of forging more equitable, less exploitative ways of coexisting with the environment.
Many of the artists selected by curators Burcu Çimen and Didem Yazıcı utilize natural and recycled materials in their work, suggesting that global change must start at home (or in this case, the studio). Hanging in the central atrium of the exhibition, Berna Dolmacı’s large-scale seascape “Foggy Blue” (2022), for example, is collaged from scrap paper colored with coffee, tea, henna, hibiscus, and other natural pigments.
Where “Foggy Blue” is soft and dreamlike, the boldly backlit installation of Rozelin Akgün’s “Pine (Patch)” (2024), a quilt of biomaterial squares produced from milk thistle (a common weed) and food-based dyes, makes these modest materials gleam like stained glass. An accompanying explanation of Akgün’s working process and the importance of weeds alludes to the risks of losing traditional knowledge about plants without explicitly mentioning the various cultural and political pressures on the artist’s majority-Kurdish hometown of Diyarbakır, including construction in the historic Hevsel Gardens, where she gathered her thistle plants.
In addition to being more ecologically sustainable, organic materials also yield more unpredictable results, forcing the artist into a position of collaborating with nature rather than trying to fully control it, as in Ekin Kano’s blown-glass sculpture “The Body Living Itself” (2019), which continually evolves due to the bacteria and fungal flora growing inside its translucent vessel. Another work by Kano, “Worshiping Ancestors” (2019–24), preserves the microorganisms from cellulose waste under glass in a series of icon-like images, honoring the origin of all life, including our own.
More dystopian is the installation “New Extremophiles” (2024) by Buşra Tunç, who shapes plastic and polystyrene scraps into rock-like piles resembling a post-industrial slag-dump landscape interspersed with video screens on which polluted-looking water flows and small plants grow in rusty cans. Artist Sibel Horada, meanwhile, collects styrofoam and polyurethane fragments that have washed up on the shore of the island where she lives, and uses them to build stalactites, fungal formations, and imaginary constellations in her Shaped by Water (2019–ongoing) series. The reuse of waste materials is creative, but also cautionary, conjuring up a future in which artificial simulacrums of nature might be all we have left.
States of Earth continues at Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts (İstiklal Caddesi No:161, Beyoğlu, Istanbul, Turkey), through March 30. The exhibition was curated by Burcu Çimen and Didem Yazıcı.
