Exhibitions

Contributing to Turkish contemporary art since 1985, Mine Sanat Galerisi continues to bring art’s relationship with current issues into view. This October, Mine Sanat Galerisi DENEYSEL hosts Can Maden’s solo exhibition, Vital Flow / Can Suyu.

The relationships between the body, nature, life and domination lie at the heart of Can Maden’s practice. Challenging the hierarchical thinking that places humans above nature and other living species, the artist explores the shared memory of the body and nature. The parallels the artist draws between the forms of control, restriction and exploitation imposed on women’s bodies and nature throughout history form the exhibition’s conceptual foundation.

Vital Flow / Can Suyu creates a living space that invites us to move beyond a human-centred perspective. Here, the body is no longer merely an anatomical structure or an object of representation; it is an organic being in continual transformation with soil, water, animals, plants and the unconscious. Fertility, reproduction and the power to sustain life emerge as parts of a shared memory extending from the human body to the cycles of the earth.

The artist’s ecofeminist and posthumanist approach questions ways of thinking that place humans at the centre, while opening a space in which the boundaries between species become permeable. The relationship between women’s bodies and nature is considered here through mutual transformation and shared existence, rather than analogy alone. Humans cease to be separate, superior beings standing in opposition to nature and become part of the same cycle of life.

In Maden’s works, the uncontrollable flow of ink, torn fibres, organic forms and interconnected body parts give visual form to this conceptual transformation. By leaving room for chance in his materials, the artist allows nature its own freedom of movement in the face of the desire for control and mastery. Flesh and soil, bone and fibre, body and landscape intermingle on the same surface instead of remaining separate. Throughout the exhibition, the human body becomes a mountainside, a water basin, an animal’s body or the trace of an ancient memory. Images ranging from archaic, many-breasted forms to capillary networks, from creatures hidden in the earth’s hollows to structures that grow lighter as they rise towards the sky, remind us how permeable the boundaries between humans and other living beings are. In the presence of these images, the city’s artificial and transient order dissolves into the continuity of geological time; what remains is the ancient cycle of water, soil and chlorophyll.

Rather than defining life solely through human experience, Vital Flow / Can Suyu invites us to consider it as a shared flow circulating between species. It also confronts us with our own repressed instincts, our fears and our fractured relationship with nature.

In the exhibition, body, matter and nature cease to be separate categories and become different forms of the same life force. Can Maden’s exhibition “Vital Flow / Can Suyu” is on view at Mine Sanat Galerisi DENEYSEL from 1 to 31 October 2026.

The exhibition’s opening reception will take place at Mine Sanat Galerisi DENEYSEL on Thursday, 1 October 2026, from 16:00 to 19:00. We invite all art lovers to experience the exhibition together.