Aslı Işıklar Çetin
Aslı Işıklar Çetin has been engaged with art from an early age and completed her undergraduate studies in Tourism Guidance. Throughout her undergraduate education, she developed a multidisciplinary theoretical foundation by taking courses in art history, archaeology, mythology, history of religions, iconography, museology, and cultural heritage. In addition, Aslı has been practicing yoga regularly since 2021; she has completed advanced yoga teacher training and currently teaches yoga professionally.
With the aim of deepening her theoretical and practical knowledge in the field of contemporary art, she participated in the Curating Contemporary Art Program jointly conducted by Akbank Sanat and Açık Diyalog İstanbul, which she successfully completed. In order to strengthen her professional practice, she began working as an intern at Elgiz Museum in February 2025 and subsequently continued her role as a museum assistant. She aims to further deepen her theoretical and practical expertise by pursuing a master’s degree in Cultural Management.
When Nature is Exhausted, Who Remains?
The exhibition calls for listening to nature’s silent yet powerful cry against human domination. It invites viewers to sense nature’s invisible resistance and rethink the relationship between humans and nature.
Humanity’s positioning of itself as a superior species and shaping everything around it in line with its own interests leads to the construction of a living environment detached from its essence and from nature. This approach transforms not only the physical environment but also social structures; the existence of nature and other living beings is subjected to a process of instrumentalization.
Believing that it becomes liberated as it moves away from nature, the human being becomes trapped within this very distance. While alienating itself in a world increasingly surrounded by artificial boundaries, it simultaneously burns with a deep desire to return to nature. This alienation not only leads humans to shape the living rights of other beings according to their selfish desires and to establish domination over nature, but also causes them to set boundaries in line with their own interests. Under the artificial comfort brought by urbanization, together with the pressures of social hierarchies and economic systems, the relationship between humans and nature has become increasingly contradictory. This contradiction threatens not only the balance between nature and humanity, but also the human being’s inner balance.
This exhibition adopts a perspective that deeply questions the human–nature relationship shaped under the influence of the capitalist system and examines it through certain dualities. Capitalism shapes humanity’s relationship with nature not only through consumption and power relations, but also through the impositions of social, cultural, and economic structures. Within this system, nature becomes a resource a commodity to satisfy humanity’s limitless interests, while the right of other living beings to exist as subjects is overlooked. In this context, nature and other living beings become part of the cycle of production and consumption. The exhibition, approaching from a post-capitalist perspective, aims to move beyond an anthropocentric viewpoint and to position the relationship between nature and humanity on a more just and sustainable ground.
The exhibition invites us to hear and understand nature’s silent yet powerful cry against human domination, to feel nature’s invisible resistance, and to rethink this relationship; it also emphasizes the necessity of restructuring the relationship between nature and humanity.