Landscaping The Whisper of Things at SANATORIUM

By Bihter Sabanoğlu

Published on December 10, 2025

“The aim of this book is to change ‘landscape’ from a noun to a verb.”

_{W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power}

This striking opening line from Mitchell’s Landscape and Power implies that landscape should not be regarded merely as an object to be seen or a text to be interpreted, but as a process through which social and individual identities are formed. Mitchell argues that landscape cannot be fully understood either through a contemplative, modernist gaze inherited from art history or through a purely interpretive, semiotic reading. Rather than asking what landscape is or what it means, he urges us to consider what it does, namely, how it operates as a cultural practice.

Sinem Dişli, The Matter of the Image, The Crystallizing Landscape, 2025, Site-specific installation; Stone, slag, soil, iron, aluminum, silver nitrate, sodium thiosulfate, and other materials, Dimensions variable. Photo by: Zeynep Fırat, Courtesy of SANATORIUM.

Curated by Uras Kızıl, the exhibition The Whisper of Things, on view at SANATORIUM in Istanbul foregrounds a posthuman perspective. As its title suggests, it proposes an assemblage of drawings, installations, paintings, photographs, and hybrid forms to explore what a landscape inclusive of nonhuman agencies might be. This broad constellation of eight artists’ works questions concepts of scale, progress, and perception, transforming the exhibition space into a landscape in the posthuman sense: one of hidden relational networks that reveal the entangled nature of humans and nonhumans, decentralizing, or rather, de-anthropocentrizing knowledge.

1. Şeylerin Fısıltısı, Yerleştirme Görseli. Photo by: Zeynep Fırat, Courtesy of SANATORIUM.

2. Sinem Dişli, The Matter of the Image, The Crystallizing Landscape, 2025, Site-specific installation; Stone, slag, soil, iron, aluminum, silver nitrate, sodium thiosulfate, and other materials, Dimensions variable. Photo by: Zeynep Fırat, Courtesy of SANATORIUM.

This new materialist approach does not exclude a historical dimension either. There is a sense of continuity in its narrative of posthumanism, where echoes of Turner’s atmospheric landscapes or even traditional ink paintings resurface. At the same time, the exhibition shifts toward a more speculative register, resonating with Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of ancestrality, and becomes a terrain where the posthuman meets the prehuman, pointing to realities that precede human observers altogether. Geological and cosmic formations, from Martian terrains to the tectonic movements foreshadowing the Great Istanbul Earthquake, invite us to imagine what “thinking before thought” or “thought in the absence of thought” might mean, and to ask whether a reality independent of thought can truly be conceived.

The exhibition shifts toward a more speculative register and becomes a terrain where the posthuman meets the prehuman, pointing to realities that precede human observers altogether.

3. Sibel Horada, Pink City, 2025, Site-specific installation; XPS board, XPS and other foamed plastics collected from the coasts, toothpick, glue (applied with variable elements), Dimensions variable. Photo by: Zeynep Fırat, Courtesy of SANATORIUM.

Geological and cosmic formations, from Martian terrains to the tectonic movements foreshadowing the Great Istanbul Earthquake, invite us to imagine what “thinking before thought” or “thought in the absence of thought” might mean.

The idea of the whisper, which quietly resonates throughout the exhibition, provokes ontological questions. Do the human and nonhuman converge in these whispers? Do we hear the sound of Miharbi’s slowly turning wheels, or the distant noise radiating from Ege Kanar’s Martian transmissions? To borrow Karen Barad’s term from Meeting the Universe Halfway, the exhibition presents itself as a space of intra-action; a convergence of environment, light, air, micro-sound waves, geological matter, and bodies, within a constructed techno-sphere of nonhuman actants. What is whispered here is done so not through anthropocentric gestures but through subtle, infra-audible, and persistent forces. Returning to Mitchell’s striking sentence, I am drawn to verbalize each artist’s work, to let landscape act like a verb, and in doing so, “to landscape” the exhibition itself.

Do the human and nonhuman converge in these whispers?

4. Ali Miharbi, Continental Drift, 2025, Mechanical parts, aluminum profile, AC motor, various disk-shaped objects, 180 x 60 x 85 cm. Photo by: Zeynep Fırat, Courtesy of SANATORIUM.

I am drawn to verbalize each artist’s work, to let landscape act like a verb, and in doing so, “to landscape” the exhibition itself.

5. Emre Hüner, comPoSiTe CoRe #3, 2025, Hermaphrodite Nemadote / Asteroid Mining Settlements, Polyurethane, silicone, epoxy, 3D print, iron, paint, color pencils, drawing on paper, plexiglass, 86 x 64 x 40 cm (Photo: Zeynep Fırat, courtesy of SANATORIUM).

6. Selim Birsel, Don't You See Somethings Are Approaching II, 2019, Ink on MDF, 60 x 120 cm. Photo: Zeynep Fırat, courtesy of SANATORIUM.

To Alert: Selim Birsel, Don’t You See That Something Is Coming? II

Birsel’s painting registers the tremor of what is about to arrive. It is a landscape burning in a bile-green light, announcing the approach of what Alain Badiou would call the “evental.” The work captures the interval between calm and catastrophe, where green tones slowly overtake the optimistic side of yellow. Yet this yellow is not entirely hopeful; it radiates an intense planetary heat, whispering of drought, the absence of food and water, and the flicker of screens broadcasting collapse. Framed as a threshold, the landscape leaves the viewer in a state of suspension; humanity has almost reached the end of time, but not quite. The tension lies in observation itself. There are no Bosch-like apocalyptic scenes here, only annunciation.

Although all the works in the exhibition communicate with one another, Birsel’s painting resonates most strongly with Dişli’s piece positioned in the vitrine, both sharing a voyeuristic tension within a restrained luminosity.

7. Sinem Dişli, The Matter of the Image, The Crystallizing Landscape, 2025, Site-specific installation; Stone, slag, soil, iron, aluminum, silver nitrate, sodium thiosulfate, and other materials, Dimensions variable. Photo: Zeynep Fırat, courtesy of SANATORIUM.

To Congeal: Sinem Dişli, The Matter of the Image, The Crystallizing Landscape

Sinem Dişli’s work sits at the literal threshold of the exhibition, occupying a liminal space between the alchemical and the geological. Placed in the vitrine, it invites a voyeuristic view into the interior space, and much like an inverted lens or a camera obscura, it transforms the act of peeping into a kind of excavation. We are not looking at an image, but into one that has grown from the soil itself; layers of photographic emulsion, sediment, and pigment fuse into paper to form a stratigraphy of perception.

Dişli uses minerals derived from the residues of photographic practices to compose an ancient syntax of compounds, emulsions, and sediment, creating a new topography. The matter is released from the photographer's hand and gains autonomy. In this slow transmutation, photography ceases to be a surface technology and becomes a mineral operation.

8. Sibel Horada, Pink City, 2025, Site-specific installation; XPS board, XPS and other foamed plastics collected from the coasts, toothpick, glue (applied with variable elements), Dimensions variable. Photo: Zeynep Fırat, courtesy of SANATORIUM.

To Disguise: Sibel Horada, Pink City

Sibel Horada’s Pink City first appears as a confection, a playful terrain of candy-colored strata. Yet its spiral of foam sheets and crumbling fragments stages a slow catastrophe. This strange monument, built from the residues of the Anthropocene, is composed of migrant materials, floating debris, and traces left by bird beaks. Horada’s landscape is one of collapse disguised as sweetness. The pink forms flake, scatter, and melt into the grey floor, as if documenting a future archaeology of plastic ruins.

Pink City also carries an undercurrent of violence. Since 2019, Horada has been collecting Styrofoam and other foam plastics along the Istanbul coastline and from the deserted areas behind the islands of the Marmara Sea. These washed-up objects often bear the marks of birds and fish, acting as fragile witnesses to nonhuman aggression and chemical decay. What appears soft and delicate thus conceals an ecological wound; a landscape both artificial and alive, shaped by the erosions of the sea and the invisible toxicity of our age.

9. Emre Hüner, comPoSiTe CoRe #2, 2025, Spermatophore / Deep Diving Hyperbaric Chamber, Polyurethane, silicone, epoxy, 3D print, iron, paint, color pencils, drawing on paper, plexiglass, 86 x 64 x 40 cm. Photo: Zeynep Fırat, courtesy of SANATORIUM.

To Fuse: Emre Hüner, comPoSite CoRe

Hüner’s comPoSite CoRe series unfolds like a posthuman landscape where acts of hybridization collapse established categories. I find myself looking at a terrain of convergence where polymer surfaces, molded frames, and sculptural organisms inhabit the same synthetic ecology. Hüner’s seemingly incompatible materials merge into uncanny nonhuman entities; creatures that are at once technological and biological, mechanical and mineral.

His hybrids also summon the imagination of future fossils: a geology yet to come. In one of the works, Hüner fuses the Byford Dolphin oil rig, a semi-submersible offshore drilling platform associated with the fatal decompression accident of 1983, with a spermatophore, a biological packet of sperm produced by certain invertebrates for reproduction. The Byford Dolphin carries the weight of industrial catastrophe, the submerged violence of deep-sea extraction, and the entangled risks of human and nonhuman forces. The spermatophore, by contrast, embodies a generative vitality and the persistence of nonhuman reproduction. Their fusion becomes a scene of double entanglement: geology with biology, industry with sexuality, machine with organism. In this coupling, the nonhuman agencies of both the drilling platform and the spermatophore co-constitute a landscape where technology, biology, and geology merge into a single material becoming.

10. Çağla Köseoğulları, Mountain, 2025, Graphic animation over photograph, 1'15'', loop, 3+2 AP. Photo: Zeynep Fırat, courtesy of SANATORIUM.

To Refract: Çağla Köseoğulları, From the Past, from the Stone? Who Knows?, Mountain

To refract is to let distance alter perception, to allow the invisible to bend the visible. In Köseoğulları’s paintings, blue is not represented but sensed; its forces are sought without being directly shown. Her low-relief textures unfold like deposits of light, their surfaces streaked with spectral greys and silvers that recall coral, stalactites, sea urchins, and cave stones. The works evoke landscapes without depicting them. Their impressions drift between fog, sea, and stone, creating a meditative depth reminiscent of nihonga painting, where atmosphere emerges from tonal gradations rather than outline.

The tension between empty space and textured gesture echoes the Japanese concept of ma, the “interval” or “pause” that gives breathing space to a composition. What is left unpainted becomes as active as what is rendered. Köseoğulları’s grayscale palette, illuminated by a diffused blue light, also recalls the austerity of ink wash painting; her blue is suspended in the air of the work. In this refractive field, light thickens into matter, and matter in turn, dissolves back into a trace of light.

11. Ali Miharbi, Continental Drift, 2025, Mechanical parts, aluminum profile, AC motor, various disk-shaped objects, 180 x 60 x 85 cm. Photo: Zeynep Fırat, courtesy of SANATORIUM.

To Shift: Ali Miharbi, Continental Drift

Ali Miharbi’s installation Continental Drift transforms a vast geological tempo into a precise mechanical rhythm. A chain of domestic and industrial objects—dartboard, cymbal, wicker tray, clock face—forms a kinetic apparatus that measures motion, nudging a small rubber duck forward by only a few millimeters. Miharbi compresses vast dimensions to a human scale; this medley of disc-shaped elements transfers rotational motion through friction, gradually slowing until it reaches the almost imperceptible speed of the Earth’s crust beneath Istanbul: approximately 2.6 centimeters per year.

The piece feels like an attempt to give form to Saint Augustine’s paradox in Book XI of Confessions: “What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know: but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not.”

We watch the motion unfold before our eyes, aware that every turn echoes the imperceptible drift of tectonic plates, the silent movement of worlds beneath our feet, yet comprehension keeps slipping away. The gentle hum of the installation and the faint oscillation of familiar objects are playful at first glance, but they carry a cosmic undertone; something akin to a planetary agency. The Earth itself becomes the protagonist, revealed as a moving, life-altering body. The “shift” in the title is not only geological; it is also a shift of perception from human to nonhuman temporality

12. Yağız Özgen, Office Area Illumination Problems, 2025, Installation containing found and custom-made objects, Site-specific, variable dimensions. Photo: Zeynep Fırat, courtesy of SANATORIUM.

To Calibrate: Yağız Özgen, Office Department Lighting Issues

In Yağız Özgen’s installation, situated in the old office area of the gallery, precision takes the lead. Tables, lamps, scales, and small plaster bags form an experimental setting: an office that feels more akin to an artisanal workshop than a conventional workspace. The grey-tiled wall, marked with formulas of tonal gradations, becomes an alchemist’s chalkboard, recalling those old engravings of Faust absorbed in his calculations, summoning something metaphysical.

Özgen’s calibration is, above all, a meditation on light. The installation plays with the dialogue between artificial and natural illumination as it filters through the ceiling, as if testing their boundaries and affinities. The table becomes a horizon where the viewer witnesses, over time, the changing temperament of light itself.

The corners in Özgen’s installation recall Bachelard’s reflections on the corner as an intimate cosmos. He writes: “Our house is our corner of the world (…) The two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other in their growth (…) At times, the simpler the image, the vaster the dream.” Özgen’s corner seems to dwell in this liminal zone between inside and outside, where inward and outward light coexist, inviting both introspection and projection.

13. Ege Kanar, Probe, 2019, 3 channel video, sound, Channel 1: 4:55, Channel 2: 4:36, Channel 3: 4:47, Sound: 7:48, Dimensions Variable, 3 + 1 AP. Photo: Zeynep Fırat, courtesy of SANATORIUM.

To Transmit: Ege Kanar, Endurance Trapped in Ice, Probe

In the basement of SANATORIUM, the subconscious or perhaps the engine room of the exhibition, Ege Kanar constructs a terrain of suspended time, lit by the glow of nostalgic monitors. Descending the spiral staircase feels like entering the inner chamber of a vessel, or the belly of a dolphin, where scientific observation and myth intertwine.

Endurance Trapped in Ice revisits Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917), the last great voyage of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Trapped in ice for months before breaking apart and sinking, the Endurance drifted like a living organism suffocating beneath frozen water. When Kanar recreates one of the photographs taken on board, using liquid-silver emulsion on glass, he also reconstructs an image of maritime imperialism, the birth of a “marine landscape” and all its contradictions.

In Probe, Kanar turns from the frozen South to the red deserts of Mars. The three-channel video installation assembles microscopic images collected by NASA’s Opportunity rover during its fourteen-year mission. These close-ups of Martian geology, captured by a fixed-focus, low-resolution camera and transmitted via radio waves, form a fragile transmission across distance, time, and atmosphere. What reaches us is never the thing itself but its echo. A planetary archive is at play here; Kanar drifts through media and epochs, from the silver emulsions of the 1910s to the digital flicker of the 2020s.

The work left me with a sense of desolate loneliness more than anything else. It feels like a continuation of Conrad’s line: “We live, as we dream—alone.” In Heart of Darkness, the dream of exploration turns inward; in Probe, seeing across planets becomes a mirror of our own isolation, the echo of our need to keep sending signals into the dark.

Ege Kanar, Probe, 2019, 3 channel video, sound, Channel 1: 4:55, Channel 2: 4:36, Channel 3: 4:47, Sound: 7:48, Dimensions Variable, 3 + 1 AP. Photo: Zeynep Fırat, courtesy of SANATORIUM.

To Landscape - Coda

After spending time with these works, I began to see the exhibition space itself as a landscape that had been verbalized; one that exerts power on its surroundings and shapes perception. The rooms felt less like a neutral backdrop and more like a geological cross-section of the earth. If landscape is a verb, then geology is its grammar.

The exhibition unfolds as a geological formation, with two floors as two strata.
The upper floor is the surface: the visible crust of light, pigment, and sound.
The lower floor is the subduction zone where images sink, dissolve, and press against one another under the weight of time.

In this layered structure, the landscape ceases to be a view and becomes an event. It speaks through materials, pressure, memory, and the slow agency of the nonhuman. The Whisper of Things ultimately performs what Mitchell proposes; it turns landscape into a verb, an active force that shapes not only what we see but also how we inhabit the world.

The Whisper of Things is on view at SANATORIUM, Istanbul, until January 10, 2026.

The Whisper of Things
Curated by Uras Kızıl
Participating Artists: Selim Birsel, Sinem Dişli, Sibel Horada, Emre Hüner, Ege Kanar, Çağla Köseoğulları, Ali Miharbi and Yağız Özgen

October 10, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday: 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Sunday: 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Address: SANATORIUM: Emekyemez Mahallesi, Abdussalah Sokak, No:3, 34421 Beyoğlu SANATORIUM Tophane: Kemankeş Mah. Mumhane Cad. Laroz Han, No:67/A, 34425 Beyoğlu
More information about the exhibition here.

About the writer
Bihter Sabanoğlu (b. 1980, Istanbul) is a writer and art critic based between Paris and Istanbul and a member of AICA. After graduating from Notre Dame de Sion French Girls' High School, she continued her undergraduate studies in English Literature at Istanbul University. She completed her master's degree in English Language and Literature at Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle University and subsequently studied various disciplines such as Greek epigraphy, hieroglyphic decipherment, and Byzantine art history at the Ecole du Louvre. In addition to independent historical research, her articles on history, art history, contemporary art, and literature have been published in journals such as Toplumsal Tarih, Yıllık: Annual of Istanbul Studies, Art Unlimited, Manifold, Sanat Kritik, Sanat Dünyamız, and international platforms such as Aica Mag and NAM. She edited Jacques Derrida's *Architecture and Deconstruction* and Ricardo Porro's *Five Aspects of Content in Architecture* for Arketon Publications. In 2022, she published her first novel, *The Discovery of Suspicious Things*. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Byzantine Art History at Sorbonne Paris III University.

About the gallery
SANATORIUM was established in 2011 as an artist initiative and has since continued its innovative attitude hosting national and international curatorial exhibitions in cooperation with various institutions, artists, and curators. SANATORIUM focuses on projects that center on critical thinking and experimentation, that are capable of presenting a new aesthetics and contribute intellectually to the artistic scenery. It participates in many international art fairs and organizes events across various media such as printed materials, tours, talks, art gatherings and performative works. The gallery continues to offer free art events in its two venues in Karaköy.

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Landscaping The Whisper of Things at SANATORIUM

“The aim of this book is to change ‘landscape’ from a noun to a verb.”

The exhibition shifts toward a more speculative register and becomes a terrain where the posthuman meets the prehuman, pointing to realities that precede human observers altogether.

Geological and cosmic formations, from Martian terrains to the tectonic movements foreshadowing the Great Istanbul Earthquake, invite us to imagine what “thinking before thought” or “thought in the absence of thought” might mean.

Do the human and nonhuman converge in these whispers?

I am drawn to verbalize each artist’s work, to let landscape act like a verb, and in doing so, “to landscape” the exhibition itself.

I am drawn to verbalize each artist’s work, to let landscape act like a verb, and in doing so, “to landscape” the exhibition itself.

The exhibition unfolds as a geological formation, with two floors as two strata.
The upper floor is the surface: the visible crust of light, pigment, and sound.
The lower floor is the subduction zone where images sink, dissolve, and press against one another under the weight of time.

︎︎︎Previous Next︎

E-Issue 09 –– RUH/JEDSpring 2025

E-09++ Fall 2025

E-Issue 08 –– SELSummer 2024

E-08++ Fall 2024

E-Issue 07 –– AUHWinter 2023-24

E-07++ Winter/Spring 2024

E-Issue 06 –– DXB/SHJSpring 2023

E-Issue 05 –– VCE Fall 2022

E-05++ Fall/Winter 2022-23

E-Issue 04 –– IST Spring 2022

E-04++ Spring/Summer 2022

E-Issue 03 ––TYO Fall 2021

E-03++ Fall/Winter 2021-22

E-Issue 02 –– NYC Spring 2021

E-02++ Spring/Summer 2021

E-Issue 01 –– AUH/DXB Summer 2020

E-01++ Fall/Winter 2020-21

🎙️GAD Talk Series –– Season 1 2020

About ––

Interviews ––

Open Call ––

Newsletter ––

Chronological Archive ––

🔍 Legal

Landscaping The Whisper of Things at SANATORIUM

“The aim of this book is to change ‘landscape’ from a noun to a verb.”

The exhibition shifts toward a more speculative register and becomes a terrain where the posthuman meets the prehuman, pointing to realities that precede human observers altogether.

Geological and cosmic formations, from Martian terrains to the tectonic movements foreshadowing the Great Istanbul Earthquake, invite us to imagine what “thinking before thought” or “thought in the absence of thought” might mean.

Do the human and nonhuman converge in these whispers?

I am drawn to verbalize each artist’s work, to let landscape act like a verb, and in doing so, “to landscape” the exhibition itself.

I am drawn to verbalize each artist’s work, to let landscape act like a verb, and in doing so, “to landscape” the exhibition itself.

The exhibition unfolds as a geological formation, with two floors as two strata.The upper floor is the surface: the visible crust of light, pigment, and sound.The lower floor is the subduction zone where images sink, dissolve, and press against one another under the weight of time.

︎︎︎Previous Next︎

E-Issue 09 –– RUH/JED
Spring 2025

E-09++
Fall 2025

E-Issue 08 –– SEL
Summer 2024

E-08++
Fall 2024

E-Issue 07 –– AUH
Winter 2023-24

E-07++
Winter/Spring 2024

E-Issue 06 –– DXB/SHJ
Spring 2023

E-Issue 05 –– VCE
Fall 2022

E-05++
Fall/Winter 2022-23

E-Issue 04 –– IST
Spring 2022

E-04++
Spring/Summer 2022

E-Issue 03 ––TYO
Fall 2021

E-03++
Fall/Winter 2021-22

E-Issue 02 –– NYC
Spring 2021

E-02++
Spring/Summer 2021

E-Issue 01 –– AUH/DXB
Summer 2020

E-01++
Fall/Winter 2020-21

The exhibition unfolds as a geological formation, with two floors as two strata.
The upper floor is the surface: the visible crust of light, pigment, and sound.
The lower floor is the subduction zone where images sink, dissolve, and press against one another under the weight of time.