Why Look at Plants?*

Burçin Başar’s solo exhibition The Restlessness Syndrome, which invites us to reconsider the act of looking at plants, takes place at x-ist between October 16 and November 15, 2025. On this occasion, we explore ways of thinking about nature as a subject with its own rhythm

Words: Merve Duran

Left: Burçin Başar, Var Kalmak, 2025, Mixed media on canvas, 40x35 cm

Right: Burçin Başar, Bir taşın arzusu olur mu?, 2025, Mixed media on canvas, 40x40 cm

“Yabani ot, erdemleri henüz keşfedilmemiş bir bitkidir.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) opens with the sentence, “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” That small decision, made in the first light of morning, always evokes in me a sense of rupture; I find myself thinking about how an ordinary act can sharpen perception. The film The Hours (2002) multiplies this sentence across three different temporalities and experiences of womanhood, while the flowers each time assume the same role: to hold the day together. Clarissa choosing a bouquet, Laura arranging a vase, Woolf taking a walk… Here, flowers are not instruments of distraction or consolation but a practice that gathers a scattered day, giving form to a sense of continuity. In daily life, too, we often perceive flowers and plants through the molds of meanings we assign to them: celebration, mourning, romance, decoration. As symbols multiply, the plant’s own existence becomes invisible. Yet plants, with their own rhythms and material presence, are always there. Perhaps the point is not to multiply the meanings we project onto them, but to change the gaze we direct toward them.

The question “Why look at plants?” may at first seem simple, yet Burçin Başar’s solo exhibition Restlessness Syndrome at x-ist transforms it into an inquiry into our perception of the nonhuman, our cultural habits, and our normative understanding of time. Plants are, in fact, always within our field of vision; however, today’s constantly stimulated mental state and the way curiosity is disrupted by rapid consumption often impose on us a flawed and incomplete gaze. This perceptual distortion, referred to in botany as “plant blindness”, a lack of interest in and awareness toward plants, manifests in the moments when we hastily label them as “ornament” or “raw material,” ignoring their fundamental behaviors such as rooting or orienting themselves. The question of vision in John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? and Giovanni Aloi’s adaptation of it in Why Look at Plants? offer a useful framework through which to read the density I encounter in the exhibition. As Aloi emphasizes, labels such as “stillness,” “passivity,” and “silence” push the plant into the cultural background; the exhibition, however, precisely reopens this gaze for reconsideration.

Left: Burçin Başar, Bir Tuhaf Sertlik I, 2025, Mixed media on canvas, 30x40 cm

Right: Burçin Başar, Bir Tuhaf Sertlik II, 2025, Mixed media on canvas, 90x110 cm

In Burçin Başar’s paintings, most of which are oil on canvas and all produced specifically for the exhibition, nature does not appear as a backdrop but as a resilient field with its own internal dynamics. Thus, the motifs of flowers and landscapes do not generate romantic or symbolic meanings; instead, they invite attentive observation and recognition. Rather than asking what the plant “means to us,” I find myself watching what it “does on its own.” In my conversation with the artist, I learn that her process begins by writing down what she envisions, then filling notebooks with countless sketches before finally moving to the canvas. For this reason, the paintings read less as “finished results” than as “continuous formations.” The composition evolves within a literary and speculative framework until it meets paint and canvas; in some works, the narrative unfolds layer by layer, creating a dreamlike aesthetic. Certain compositions are built through photography and collage before coming to life, while others are drawn and painted simultaneously, each feeding and accompanying the other. The experiments with sculpture and video projection onto canvas, seen in the artist’s earlier exhibitions, here, gave away entirely to painting.

There is much to learn from plants, not so much from the meanings we impose upon them, but from what they can teach us about nature, and even about humanity, potential, and possibility. One of these lessons is to resist with hope. We may think of plants as passive beings; yet they can also be read as the most steadfast of resisters through the sheer persistence of their existence. In his text Resist Like a Plant, Michael Marder writes: 

Standing for nonviolence par excellence, the plant has been identified in the history of Western thought with a living icon of peace, a non-oppositional being, wholly included in the place wherein it grows, to the point of merging with the milieu. As Hegel notes in his Philosophy of Nature, unlike an animal, who opposes itself to its place, insofar as it is able to dislocate and to find itself elsewhere, the plant is shackled to its environment, which is not at all “other” to it. [...] And when protesters pitch tents in parks or on city squares, they reinvent the strange modern rootedness in the uprooted world of the metropolis, existentially signifying their discontent by merely being there.

Left: Burçin Başar, Again, But This Time, Gently, 2025, Tuval üzerine yağlı boya, 50x60 cm

Right: Burçin Başar, Again, But This Time, Knowingly, 2025, Tuval üzerine yağlı boya, 50x60 cm

At this point, the 2013 Gezi Park protests come to mind: the tents set up around the trees that were to be cut down staged a form of “rootedness” that did not claim ownership but instead bound bodies to place; there, people resisted with hope—like plants, like trees. In this sense, the feeling of hope and the metaphor of sprouting anew from the soil in Başar’s painting Again, But This Time, Gently become more tangible when read alongside Again, But This Time, Knowingly. In both works, the material itself leaves traces of its own past and meaning on the surface. There is something reminiscent of Anselm Kiefer’s sensitivity to the strata of history through material, which Başar cites as an influence: the soil brought from the artist’s village in Malatya and fixed onto the surface of these two paintings transforms the notions of “origin” and “taking root” from abstract references into substances so tangible they could crumble at a touch. This choice makes intention visible through material.

Left: Burçin Başar, The Restlessness Syndrome, 2025, Oil on canvas, 150x230 cm

Right: Burçin Başar, Escape Plan from Sleep!, 2025, Oil on canvas, 149x199 cm

When viewed up close and given a moment of attention, the paintings’ colors and tones seem to draw the viewer inward through a peculiar chaos, and a sense of layering is felt powerfully throughout the exhibition. In the painting The Restlessness Syndrome, which gives the exhibition its title, serenity is not a promise to be attained but emerges instead within the tension between the painting’s chaotic explosion of color and the vivid floral composition, a possibility of looking at, and learning from, nature’s multiplicities. Escape Plan from Sleep! constructs a fairytale-like landscape aesthetic; yet this dreamlike state is constantly disrupted by paint marks that divide the surface into dozens of small points. This state of dispersion recalls what Mark Fisher calls “depressive hedonia,” a condition of mind in which the pursuit of pleasure limits one’s capacity for thought and pause. As Fisher notes, within capitalist structures, leisure becomes blurred in a low-intensity yet continuous flow of stimuli; the mind is deprived of moments of idleness and waiting. As Başar explains, these paintings, produced out of what she calls “the mind’s need to purge itself of visual pollution,” offer small pauses, intervals that pull the mind out of its “sleep mode” amid the scattering force of speed.

Left to right: Burçin Başar, A Mysterious Secrecy, 2025, Oil on canvas, 180x160 cm

Burçin Başar, You can’t teach a flower to bloom, 2025, Gel pen on paper, 130x140 cm

Burçin Başar, Time often passed like this, and a courage was flowing from the real world, 2025, Gel pen on paper, 130x137.5 cm

The notion that might be called “plant time” also becomes more legible here: cycles such as growth, dormancy, and re-sprouting, the interwoven transitions of seasons, and the seed’s state of sleep all evoke a non-linear perception of time. In A Mysterious Secrecy, the tension between black and white disrupts the decorative surface of a large orchid, creating a hypnotic atmosphere that produces a subtle sense of unease. Yet this uncanniness is, in a strange way, consoling: the layers function as a kind of “slowing device” placed between the eye and the mind, countering the speed of algorithms. It is a small but insistent objection to a temporality measured solely by the “human now.” The hallmark of another work is already hidden in its title: Time often passed like this, and a courage was flowing from the real world. In this piece, unlike the other oil paintings, the repeated movements and lines painstakingly drawn with fine-tipped gel pens weave shadowed textures, deepening the tonal gradation.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Rêvolutions, 2015. Photo: Laurent Leca

One of the concepts that frames my experience of the exhibition is “vegetal agency.” As Marder discusses, plants may not act with conscious intention like humans do; yet they respond stubbornly and situationally through gestures of orientation, light-seeking, and resistance. When I think of this in a concrete external context, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s rêvolutions (2015), presented in the French Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, comes to mind: an installation in which living pine trees move imperceptibly within the space through low-voltage electrical and motorized bases, an arrangement that operates with, rather than upon, the plant’s own movement, light, and sound. The aim is not to make the tree “move like a human,” but to render visible its responses to the environment and its inherent logic of motion. Placed alongside the perspective of The Restlessness Syndrome, this example allows me to see more clearly the moments when the plant ceases to be passive and emerges as an active agent. The artist’s large-scale gel pen drawing You can’t teach a flower to bloom reiterates this idea: flowering depends on circumstance and on the plant’s own being.

At this point, it is necessary to open a historical parenthesis as interpreted by Giovanni Aloi. As Aloi notes, in Western art history, particularly from the seventeenth century onward, the hierarchy institutionalized by authorities such as André Félibien placed history and religious painting, centered on the human figure, at the top, while fruit-and-flower paintings and still lifes were relegated to the lower ranks, coded as “decorative arts” and as the domain of women. The systematic exclusion of women artists from prestigious training and competitions, for example, the prohibition against working with nude models, pushed them toward these so-called “minor genres.” As long as plants were used not for their own being but as symbols, viewers were conditioned to look at them not to see nature, but to seek anthropocentric meanings within them. This reading exposes the cultural ground of the deep-rooted neglect toward plants, one intertwined with gender and social norms.

The trajectory that extends into the present also calls forth a critique of “plant-capital.” As Aloi points out, from botanical gardens to supermarket chains, plants have stood at the center of colonialism and industrial agriculture, seen not only as subjects of exploitation but also as silent foundational elements of modern economies. Turning back to my own daily life: in the heart of Istanbul, within an existence suffocated by concrete, I find myself searching for greenery that lives freely beyond the unfortunate and senseless landscaping around me, clinging to the smallest patch of green I can find. At the entrance of a supermarket I hurriedly pass through, I see potted plants “on sale,” most of them drooping. I realize that the “value” of a cheap houseplant comes not from its existence, but from its potential for display. The Restlessness Syndrome reverses this distortion: the plant returns to itself, to its sphere of agency, transforming from a “product to be looked at” into a “process to be witnessed.”

Left: Burçin Başar, Just Like This and Different! I, 2025, Oil on canvas, 100x130 cm

Right: Burçin Başar, Just Like This and Different! II, 2025, Oil on canvas, 90x120 cm

As I leave the exhibition, what lingers is not so much a “sense of nature” as a feeling of “renewed looking.” Burçin Başar’s The Restlessness Syndrome proposes an ethics and aesthetics of seeing that aligns itself with the nonlinear patience of vegetal time. It calls for us to regard the plant not as an object molded by our anthropocentric symbols, but as an active agent—one that resists, slows down, and teaches us possibility. The exhibition may be read as a gesture that counters the compulsion of the rapidly consumed “present moment,” functioning as a decelerator that transforms looking from a habit into an ethical practice toward a more just future. For, as Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us, what we call a “weed” only because we do not know its value may, in fact, be our most patient and persistent neighbor—teaching us how to live and how to look together.

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* It is a reference to the expansion of John Berger’s question “Why Look at Animals?” toward the realm of plants by Giovanni Aloi in “Why Look at Plants?”

References

• Giovanni Aloi, Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art, Leuven University Press, 2018.

• James H. Wandersee ve Elisabeth E. Schussler, “Preventing Plant Blindness,” The American Biology Teacher 61/2, 1999.

• John Berger, About Looking (specially “Why Look at Animals?”), 1980.

• Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zero Books, 2009.

• Michael Marder, “Resist Like a Plant: On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements,” Peace Studies Journal, 2012.

• Michael Marder, Time Is a Plant, Brill, 2023.