Three Hues of Water focuses on "human - non-human relation" The exhibition is an extension of Deniz’s works that were exhibited in the 16th Istanbul Biennial: The Seventh Continent. In this new exhibition, she continues to unfold our relationship with nature, especially with animals. Rights and law maknig practices around non human entities, history value systems, losses, extinctions, perception of nature are constituting the themes of the exhibition....
"Sorrow (2019), the video-sculpture installation made by the recycled materials from the previous exhibition at Zilberman, Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s ISLANDS, stands as a complete contrast to the fast-paced, crowded and even chaotic state of Istiklal Street on which the gallery resides. It carries river streams from the Longoz forests in İğneada, on which a nuclear plant is planned to be built, to the gallery. A catalog of the moments of a stream, this sculpture makes us ponder on the holism that is associated with nature. What does the river encompass? When should a stream get our attention? Can water that runs by itself have rights of its own, can it be a legal person?
In Eluding “humans” (2019) we encounter animals which stay away from people, as if dodging their wrath, in their natural habitats. These images are captured by sensor camera traps that were built in order to investigate the nocturnal animals.
In The Camera Trap of Inequalities (2019), Deniz captures and then deletes the images of the visitors of the exhibition via a camera trap she constructed herself with a motion sensor. The accompanying legal text, outlining the legal issues that arise when photographing people, indicates the discrimination between people and other species.
Inspired by a game she played as a child, in her video work About Soft Bodied Evils (2019) Deniz places thorns on our soft and harmless bodies. Accompanying the video, texts by Aristotle and Pilny the Elder from the antiquity and the medieval anonymous text, point to the historical trajectory of the relationship between humans and nature. Since prehistory, this relationship was shaped through the evil, hypocritical, arrogant, self-absorbed and cruel deeds of humankind, who ironically lack the tusks or claws. With the help of the thorns that plants possess for self-defense, Deniz extricates the evilness and selfishness that is specific to humans from where they hide – under the softness of their bodies.
A new version of her installation History of a particular nameless creek “Insignificants” (2019) that was on view at the 16th Istanbul Biennial, in The Moment of glimpse (2019) Deniz displays the tiny organic and inorganic objects that she collected. By unearthing what is otherwise neglected, making it visible and even precious, by giving a gift of a portrait to the woodpecker recently spotted in Longoz forest after being thought as extinct for years, she exhibits her perseverance to not exclude that which is politically taken out of sight." [ Excerpt from the press release.Photo Credits: Kayhan Kaygusuz.