Duygu Toprak
Duygu Toprak is a cultural practitioner, researcher, and editor working at the intersection of urbanism, geography, and contemporary art. She holds a BA in City and Regional Planning from Middle East Technical University and an MSc in Human Geography and Planning from Utrecht University. Her practice is shaped by long-term engagements with commons-based thinking and the politics of everyday life. Before focusing fully on cultural work, she spent a decade working as a political officer in the fields of economic policy, human rights, and domestic politics. She has developed and contributed to collaborative research and publishing projects, including Ortaklaşa: Commoning the City, a multi-platform initiative combining research, editorial work, and public dialogue around commoning practices. She approaches contemporary art as a space where ecological, spatial, and more-than-human perspectives can be explored through curatorial research, field-based methods, and interdisciplinary dialogue.
Reworlding
Inspired by Donna Haraway’s concept of reworlding, the exhibition approaches ecology at the intersection of knowledge, aesthetics and politics, questioning how artistic practices transform nature representations.
In the face of planetary ecological breakdown, what possibilities emerge if ecology is understood as a field of mutual learning between human and more-than-human beings? What modes of seeing can move beyond anthropomorphic tendencies such as resemblance, intentionality, or empathy? How might conceiving non-human beings as agents reshape prevailing notions of commoning?
Named after Donna Haraway’s concept, Reworlding approaches ecology as a field of inquiry situated at the intersection of knowledge, aesthetics, and politics. By examining how nature representations such as scientific illustrations, landscapes, and still lifes operate—what perspectives they include and what they leave out—the exhibition reconsiders how artistic practices transform, disrupt, and rework representational conventions within a broader historical continuum.
The exhibition is structured around three interwoven axes that seek to move beyond the nature–culture divide: attention, critique, and collaboration. Attention foregrounds an ethical and epistemological stance grounded in listening and intuition, articulated through works that resist symbolic language and emphasize materiality. The axis of critique brings together works that examine how nature has historically been subjected to regimes of classification, control, and violence, pointing to the ideological and historical burdens embedded in representations of nature. Collaboration, informed by ideas of temporary, fragile, and shared networks, focuses on practices of thinking and producing together through multispecies narratives.
Rather than framing ecological destruction, violence, and politics through discourses of catastrophe and despair, Reworlding addresses these entanglements through works that unsettle anthropocentric normative classifications, open up hybrid imaginaries, and attempt to move beyond the limits of human sensory perception in response to idealized images of nature. Instead of seeking solutions, the exhibition proposes “staying with the trouble,” offering speculative imagination not only as a way of thinking about the future, but as a method for collectively shaping the present.