Hybrid co-presence of time and matter

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s solo exhibition Phantom Quartet, curated by Nilüfer Şaşmazer, is on view at Arter through 9 August 2026. Ahead of the exhibition, we met with the artist to discuss the conceptual journey that extends across the notions of time, place and witnessing

Interwiev: İlker Cihan Biner

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan. Photo: Berk Kır

I conducted an extensive preparation while developing the questions for Hera Büyüktaşcıyan. I read and examined nearly all of her interviews, and I took detailed notes on her works. My conversation with her moves in directions of its own, forming what could be described as a constellation of ideas that brings together ecology, memory, objects, literature and the formative stages of Büyüktaşcıyan’s aesthetic practices. With the artist’s elegant, nuanced and deeply considered responses, the interview takes on a multi-layered and distinctive character, becoming something archival in spirit. Let us turn to this conversation and the network of thought it opens.

I would like to begin with a prickly question, one that echoes the tenor of your work. There are those who speak of nature as if it were a person. Phrases such as “Nature will take its revenge” or “Nature always finds a way” are among the most familiar examples. When we think of your exhibitions and works, it is clear that you do not align yourself with such a human-centred conception of nature. How do you draw the connections between ecology and contemporary art?

I believe that once we position nature as something standing apart from the human, we move away from the very core of ecological thought, much like the way we estrange ourselves from our own essence. Ecology is not solely a matter concerning the environment; it also describes a terrain of thought in which different beings and organisms are interwoven. If we break the word into its parts and return to its roots, we see that it derives from the Greek oikos, meaning “home”, “dwelling” or “habitat”, and logos, used in the sense of “word” or “knowledge”. Although it is commonly used in reference to nature, ecology can, in essence, be read as a kind of “science of place”, or the study of where things take root and establish themselves. This evokes, for me, the idea of a shared surface, process and perhaps even a shared fate held by many elements that stem from different systems and value structures.

In this sense, the question of the nonhuman’s witnessing is profoundly important to me. It is akin to placing oneself in the position of a material, an object, a living being or a river, and attempting to perceive the world through its gaze. It requires stepping outside the ways of seeing that have been ingrained in us for centuries, which makes it anything but an easy practice to acquire. Yet once it becomes possible, it opens a space for us to understand the time flowing around us and the human and nonhuman phenomena shaped by human intervention in a different register.

In my practice, nature is not an “other” that I consider separate from myself or from those who came before me. On the contrary, it is the very network of hybrid co-presence in which time and matter intermingle, allowing certain fractures to become clearer. This entanglement becomes visible at times in the gesture borne by a form, and at other times in the new body assumed by a material, in sound, in surfaces, textures and layers.

I think of narratives of human erasure as folding into a cycle of destruction that extends to the depletion of what belongs to nature, forming an endless play of reflections that pass between one another. Encountering effaced faces in an anthropomorphic piece of tree bark, finding islands shaped by tectonic movements in a fragment of wall severed from its context, or hearing the echo of a dried watercourse in laundry that cascades downward like a waterfall. This simultaneity of existences points to the encounters at the heart of ecology and to the fact that these dualities are part of the same ecosystem.

Rather than representing nature, I seek to absorb ways of sensing that fall outside familiar anthropocentric perspectives, and to read the subjective, the social and the historical through this lens. The more the human places itself at the centre, the less able it becomes to hear what lies beyond it. Yet the witnessing and the capacity to record held by the nonhuman seem to me older and more coherent than our own. Despite the circularity of time, it is a form of witnessing that is in constant transformation and yet remains enduring and dependable.

In my practice, nature is not an other that I consider separate from myself or from those who came before me. On the contrary, it is the very network of hybrid co-presence in which time and matter intermingle, allowing certain fractures to become clearer. This entanglement becomes visible at times in the gesture borne by a form and at other times in the new body assumed by a material, in sound, in surfaces, textures and layers.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Like an Avalanche Started by a Gentle Push, 2023 [2025], Industrial carpet, wood, 14,9 × 3,17 m. Photo: Murat Germen

In the chaotic and noisy order of the present world, your gaze turns toward silence, toward what remains unseen, toward what is kept in the dark, toward the crowded communities that those in power attempt to erase from the map. In your life, are politics and art intertwined? Could one say that you knot these two difficult realms together?

To call something political feels somewhat assertive to me, and it carries a certain responsibility as well. Yet poetics and politics are, in my view, deeply connected. Whenever something concealed rises to the surface and becomes speakable, or reappears in another form, it already suggests a political stance. It is as if raising a form to its feet, making a mark on an empty surface or within a space that holds a sense of absence, giving voice to what is unexpected or unsaid, or initiating even the slightest movement carries that stance in itself. It also feels like proposing a new mode of existence that moves against the established order through which the world, or worlds, revolve.

Art, for me, is a space where what is invisible manifests through different languages and bodies. While it allows new narratives to emerge, it also leaves an ambiguous space that continues to live and be completed in the viewer’s mind. This ambiguity becomes a zone where material, image, trace and context collide with the presence of what is hidden, reinforcing one another. It is the tension that emerges from this collision and the forms of existence that arise from it that interest me. Because it tells us much about the cycles of destruction and reconstruction inherent to life and to the histories built around us, I try to read and absorb things in my own life through this lens.

The appearance or reminder of the unexpected or the avoided, which I mentioned earlier, takes shape in my life and my practice through certain encounters and conflicts. Looking toward time and behind dominant narratives feels grounding to me, rather than relying on a single front and its shadow. In this sense, I often find in myself a tendency to swim against the current.

This is a way of being, but also a struggle of its own.

In a moment when magnitude, force and surface realities dominate our sense of truth, creating space again through gestures that are simpler yet deeply rooted, or through a voice that resonates from within, feels essential to me.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Fire Birds, 2025, Porcelain bird figurines, geotextile felt, wood, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist, Green Art Gallery Dubai and Galerist. Photo: Murat Germen

Memory is one of the central threads running through your exhibitions, including works such as The Island of the Day Before, which I understand as an allusion to Umberto Eco’s novel. Remembering always involves an act of trimming, cutting or selecting. Once memory becomes transmission, a process of choosing inevitably follows. How do wounds of identity, shadowed recollections and dispersed narrative threads surface in your work? In what ways do these themes interact with the materials you use?

The act of trimming, cutting or selecting that you describe is an astute observation. This very process of deconstruction, when I come into contact with particular spans of time, becomes both a guide and a way of opening intermediary paths that connect elements arriving from different temporalities, allowing them to form new wholes.

Of course, this process also brings with it fragile perimeters, delicate balances and many questions concerning what rises easily to the surface, what requires another language to emerge and what remains in silence. As I sift through these questions, I also consider where the piece of memory that stands before me corresponds within myself or within my own lived experience and past, and what kind of reflection or echo it represents. Otherwise, if one end of this process is not anchored in the human, it begins to slip into an uncanny mode of representation, becoming something consumed and emptied out.

In this process, I think the moment I trust most is when my hand comes into contact with material. For me, the hand remembers and records more than the mind. As material turns into form, the hand approaches all that the mind has distilled with its own sensory archive, sometimes consciously and often intuitively, stretching the boundaries of matter through endless possibilities. This allows the temporal fracture in question to appear in an unexpected body and to find its resonances in a colour, a texture, a sound, a line or within the density of layered surfaces.

In this way, a certain historicity can be read without hollowing it out, through a more expansive temporal frame. We can see the reflection of a shadowed narrative in the transience of construction fabric, in a tile fragment severed from its whole yet rising again, or in a carpet surface that seals fleeting traces. In this sense, material, colour and elements that speak to different forms of sensoriality can retrieve a forgotten element and bring it back into presence.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, The Unquiet Balcony, 2025, Wood, cast iron acanthus leaf motifs, kinetic mechanism, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist, Green Art Gallery Dubai and Galerist. Photo: Murat Germen

Three words seem to hold particular significance in your artistic life: water, memory and geography. They appear distinct from one another, yet they remain in close contact. Could you speak about the importance or the value of these terms in your life?

I see these three elements as interconnected, both conceptually and physically. Water is not only a vital element but also a force that divides and joins geographies, transforming matter, stone, soil and all surfaces. Yet I believe this fluid, shifting nature also has a counterpart in the mental and spiritual realm: the fluid structure of time, its passing, and the way it erodes certain temporal strata and fragments of memory.

For me, forgetting and remembering have always evoked the ebb and flow of water. As the waters of the mind rise, existing elements become submerged and forgotten, and as they recede, what lies beneath becomes visible again. This movement has, over time, become a concept I often return to, which I describe as “the aquatic nature of the mind”.

This fluid structure allows things to seep through unexpected apertures, enabling what comes from the past to permeate the present. At the same time, through this constant movement, mnemonic images appear within a particular span of time and then recede again. In this sense, it also implies a kind of transience. Memory therefore becomes an intermediary space in which the endless tensions between water and earth, their mutual repulsion and interpenetration, accumulate and are recorded.

While the earth or geography is the surface where we take root or attempt to anchor ourselves, the infinite and cyclical movement of water, or of imagined flows, creates a continual surface tension. For me, this is memory itself, a kind of excavation site where what is preserved and what is forgotten, remembering and the gouging and tracing of the surface, coexist.

Beyond these readings, it also seems to me that we are all witnessing a moment in which memory is neglected, and water and geography have become direct witnesses and carriers of dispossession. These two elements, which hold the strata of time and the archive of traces, both accumulate and physically experience the sediments of violence and transformation.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Seldom Seen Soon Forgotten, 2018, Capiz shells, wood, brass, 7 pieces, Dimensions variable, Arter Collection. Photo: Murat Germen

In recent years, we have encountered many object-oriented artistic practices. Yet the history of the bonds humans form with objects, living or nonliving, stretches far back. Humans themselves are, after all, a species composed of objects. The objects you use in your works seem always to be in motion. Where does your enduring curiosity about objects originate?

I would say it is a curiosity I believe I have carried since childhood. To my curiosity about objects, one could also add a curiosity about place and architecture, because the interplay between the two and the impressions they left on me allowed me, over time, to imagine internal sub-spaces of my own. My inclination to carry or construct spaces within spaces perhaps stems from this.

I had created a world for myself in which I saw spaces as organisms that held different temporalities, in which I spoke with objects and believed they responded. Perhaps this also grew out of listening to the stories of people who no longer existed and, in a sense, filling the void created by their absence with objects and spaces. This is why emptiness and invisibility resonate with me in very particular ways. There was an approach that sought to locate their counterparts in objects and physical environments, almost exchanging that absence for another form of existence. I had, it seems, an early awareness that the witnessing of nonhuman beings was more real, more truthful. Then again, childhood is the period in which each person sees life, nature and their surroundings with a more genuine, unfiltered and expansive gaze. Blindness and deafness feel like conditions acquired later, settling into us as we age. So yes, these bonds often take me back to the point where my life began.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, An Archipelago Fugue, 2019-ongoing, Porcelain, brick, concrete, ceramic, bronze, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist, Green Art Gallery Dubai and Galerist. Photo: Murat Germen

Your works have been exhibited, and continue to be exhibited, across very different geographies. Many people have seen them, thought about them, discussed them or criticised them. As you continue to produce, there will inevitably be audiences with whom you are in dialogue. As an artist, does this situation influence your later processes of making work? Do the questions or critiques that linger in your mind transform into modes of art-making shaped by the presence of the viewer?

Both yes and no. I inevitably think about the ways viewers interact and relate, especially in site-specific installations. A work has a relationship with the place it inhabits and a language it establishes there. This conversational state largely determines how people position themselves, how they co-exist with the work and the movement that circulates around it. As someone who thinks together with space, this is naturally something I consider. As you noted, the ways a work is perceived differ in each geography in which it is shown, and its reception shifts accordingly. Viewers engage with the work through their own subjective and cultural constellations, which allows the piece to become a living organism without being hollowed out. In short, it continues its life differently in every viewer’s mind.

On the other hand, when criticism is constructive and points to something I had not yet seen, it can influence my way of working in the next phase. Yet in the long run, it is crucial to know when to leave this at a healthy distance and to return to one’s own essence and intuition in order to become one with the work. In both senses, it is a matter of maintaining a balanced distance from the work and the act of making, while neither drifting away from one’s core nor creating a boundary between the viewer and the work.

For me, the hand remembers and records more than the mind. As material turns into form, it approaches all that the mind has distilled with the sensory archive of a limb, and with movements that are sometimes deliberate and more often intuitive, it can stretch the limits of matter through endless possibilities.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, The Coat of an Early River, 2025, Drawing and frottage with graphite on fabric, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist, Green Art Gallery Dubai and Galerist. Photo: Murat Germen

Alongside the visual arts, you work with sound, poetry, mythology and architecture. Taken together, these point to a sustained passion for interdisciplinary forms of narration. I am curious about the place of literature in your life. Are there poets, writers or books that inspire you?

Literature and music are, I think, the two elements that most fundamentally ground my visual language. Literary texts, especially poetry, allow me not only to interpret my own world but also to dismantle and rebuild things, to mediate and, in a sense, to give courage. The hybridity I mentioned earlier, the simultaneous existence and collision of elements that come from different structures and temporalities, excites me deeply when I encounter it in the world of words. It is like meeting a familiar face or pulling something into view from a corner one had not thought to look.

There are, of course, many poets and writers who inspire me. In the realm of poetry, I have, in recent years, felt drawn to writers from postwar British literature who explore the axis of nature, humanity and existence. Kathleen Raine is foremost among them. The first work I encountered was Stone & Flower, a book of poems whose inner life was also depicted by Barbara Hepworth. Through this, I entered Raine’s world. I can say that it was largely through her poetry and writing that I began to see the deeper connections between my practice and nature. Other poets I have returned to frequently in the past few years include T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Rimbaud, Rilke, Odysseas Elytis, Yannis Ritsos, Lee Maracle and İlhan Berk. T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets has, after Raine, become the book I return to most often.

As for writers, the first who comes to mind, and one I hold in constant devotion, is Virginia Woolf. I read many of her books periodically and in rotation, because each reading reveals a different detail. Depending on my perception and emotional state at the time, she allows for new encounters with every return. Beyond her, Selim İleri, Leyla Erbil, Zabel Yesayan, Ocean Vuong, Kazuo Ishiguro and many others move me with their mastery of description. And the world of words and imagination of M. Mahsum Oral, whom I had the chance to know personally, affects me in the same way. His latest book, Ev Düşkünü Bazı Rüzgârlar, was extraordinary.

Do you have a new exhibition project in the works? What themes or narrative threads will you explore in your upcoming projects?

I am currently working on my solo exhibition Phantom Quartet, which will open at Arter. The exhibition is curated by Nilüfer Şaşmazer. Alongside works produced in recent years but not previously shown in Turkey, it also includes a series of new pieces developed specifically for this exhibition. It creates a space within a space in which we encounter a set of manifestations that carry past imaginaries of the earth into the present, situated along the axis of time, place, nature, humanity and the city. As its title suggests, the exhibition is grounded in several quartets. Referring to the four elements of fire, air, water and earth as well as to the four temporalities of past, present, future and liminality, the exhibition space becomes a site where traces, surfaces and forms emerge and unfold.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Phantom Quartet, Exhibition view, Curator: Nilüfer Şaşmazer Arter, 2025. Photo: Murat Germen