Life, the web of connectivity of existence that we are a part of, is in a time-transcending whole. Within this wholeness beyond time, no being's life begins with its own birth. In the cycle, the fact that a person who is thrown to a point in life feels separate from the whole in their emotions and thoughts and sees nature and life as spoils offered to them, is the result of religious teachings, the mechanistic understanding of the universe that views existence as something isolated from other environments and things, and deterministic assumptions. Albert Einstein[2] says that this separation is a kind of optical illusion that our consciousness tricks us, with a hint of goodwill. The limits of our senses and minds, the conditions imposed by our subjectivity may be the fundamental reason why we think of ourselves as separate from nature while trying to grasp and understand life in its entirety.
In fact, we have lungs to breathe and eyes to see. Darwin's discovery is that we understand why these structures exist by reversing the cause-effect relationship between their usefulness and their existence. Function (seeing, eating, breathing, digesting...contributing to life) is not the purpose of the structures; on the contrary, living beings survive because these structures exist.[3] This reversal is a failure of thought systems that center human life. Life is not for humans. Like everything else, we are subject to the immutable and eternal laws of nature. And, like everything that exists, our bodies are in extension and intertwined with the world we inhabit.
Realizing an independent, isolated existence in the universe is impossible, the island becomes a second root, a source to create a new reality. When we change our perspective, the island offers an intellectual viewpoint that can help us better understand the interconnectedness of everything. Put simply, if sea levels were significantly lower, many islands would be connected to continents.
What makes the island the focus of this text and exhibition is its topological and conceptual richness. To contemplate an island is also to consider how it makes us feel. The island, with its physical structure, is also related to the dualities created by finitude and immensity; the feeling of light created by the moon shining on the sea on a calm night. When Novalis said that the seat of the soul is the place where the outer and inner worlds meet, he must have experienced such a moment when the inner and outer fold together and intertwine.
Thinking like an island, while decentralizing us, tries to feel and capture different sensitivities and increase and change the frequencies of our perception. In the way of thinking where practice and theory merge, while emphasizing that the artist thinks not about an object of research but together with something in the process of becoming, what is also mentioned is decentralization. The artist produces in a way that first unravels the ground they stand on, their knowledge and assumptions, then reweaves them in different ways by getting entangled in this texture.
The initial determination of the reality of a true existence lies in its being in a place. Spatial continuity is the locus where all potential things have complex relations. The island is also a natural matrix where all events take place with the vital movement of its unique fauna and flora behind its deserted and static appearance.
The island, where relationality is vividly observed in all forms of existence, the transition of nature is felt in a layered manner, the harmony born from the union of land and water surrounds the atmosphere with changing frequencies, with its suspended temporality and fragility, simultaneous pressure of the fluctuations of vitality on our senses, brings us closer to our own bodies; with the air we breathe into our lungs, the breeze brushing against our skin as it passes, the whisper in our ear, with the sense of multiplicity that sensation splits the inside and the outside, it also purifies us from all empty judgments, opinions, and beliefs and draws us into the nature we belong to.
In Aslıhan’s art practice, which has spanned nearly twenty years, her recent paintings diverge from the layered canvas surfaces dominated by horizontal-vertical spatial architectural elements, generally perceived as mathematical and constructed; instead, a sense of fluidity and transparency prevails over rigid, solidified artistic forms. Aslıhan carries her creative process, which she continues without being bound to a certain material, technique and form, towards innovation without falling into repetition, the intellectual processes that form the background of her works are also transformed.
In the exhibition “Star-Island”, Aslıhan utilizes the possibilities of painting to explore the sensory and physical phenomenon between the ground and the sky. When we look at the sky covering the island, the trillions of kilometers between the stars we see and us who watch them with admiration disrupt our perception of space-time, we can understand that our Earth is astronomically close to zero level. Such an encounter or awareness challenges the illusion of ownership we fall into during our quest to understand life/the universe, and also becomes the ground for us to confront the shadow/dark aspects of our existence.
When I saw Aslıhan’s watercolor paintings, many of which I know she made while in nature, as well as those she painted in her studio, with her inner imagination of nature and the island, and her video installation titled Bird-Fish, which we brought together under the title “Star Island”, I felt that she was turning to a simple, poetic narrative language, purified of excesses, as she described it.
“…The poet creates, outside of the world which exists, a world which should exist. The value of the language of poetry comes directly from its separation from spoken language.[4]”
I think that if the word painter is used instead of “poet” and pictorial is used instead of “poetic” in these expressions quoted from the speech of the poet Huidobro at a conference in Madrid, it will not lose much of its meaning. I believe that Aslıhan's watercolor paintings in the “Star Island” exhibition come to life with such sensitivity. The painter creates a world that should exist outside the existing world. The value of the pictorial language comes from its separation from spoken language. The painter depicts the movement and vitality behind the unseen.
In one of our common readings with Aslıhan, physicist Carlo Rovelli’s book “The Order of Time”, brings together two cultures that cannot reconcile, science and art, when he says, “Perhaps poetry is one of science’s deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the invisible.”
Causality is only one of the possible forms of relationships, and the hegemony of causality leads to the impoverishment of the world and experience. A magical world is one in which causal connections do not govern the relationships between things, and where things share their intimacy and secrets. Causality is a mechanical and external relationship. Magical and poetic relationships with the world are based on a sympathy that binds people and things together.
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[1] E. A. Poe, Bütün Şiirleri (Complete Poems), Translation: Oğuz Cebeci, Oğlak Publications, Istanbul-1999, p.58.
[2] Türker Kılıç, Yeni Bilim: Bağlantısallık Yeni Kültür: Yaşamdaşlık (New Science: Relationality, New Culture: Symbiosis), Ayrıntı Publications, Istanbul, 2023, p. 13.
[3] Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland-Kuantum Devrimini Anlamlandırmak (Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution), Translation: Tolga Esmer, Tellekt, İstanbul-September 2022, pp.130-131.
[4] Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psiko Büyü (Psychomagic), Tr. Nihal Mumcu, Alfa Literature, Istanbul-September 2016, P.35.