Contemporary artist and academic Murat Durusoy’s video Doğa Sonrası Etütleri V.2 (Post-Nature Studies V.2), a new addition to the Sakıp Sabancı Museum’s collections, is now on view in the galleries housing the Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection.
Installed in the space that was once the viewing balcony of the Atlı Köşk and was arranged as the Landscape Room after the building became a museum, the work takes as its starting point the Judas tree, bay laurel, sweetgum, oleander and rosemary growing in the SSM Garden. Transformed into synthetic polymers, circuit boards and metallic textures, these plants take on an appearance in which nature merges with man-made materials, pointing to the Anthropocene – the age in which human impact has permanently altered the planet’s natural balance and the climate crisis is felt ever more keenly.
Durusoy’s video enters into an unusual dialogue with the works decorated with plant motifs in the Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection. Drawing inspiration from symmetrical calligraphic compositions embellished with gold illumination, it reinterprets the tension between nature and technology as a kind of “digital still life”.
Working around the concepts of climate crisis, technology, memory, time and the image, academic and contemporary artist Murat Durusoy conceives his “Doğa Sonrası Etütleri” series as a field that does not merely observe nature but reproduces it through technology. Processing plant footage he has shot himself with layered digital interventions, refractions of light and synthetic surface textures, he makes visible the traces of human intervention on nature’s surface. This way of working transforms both the near-documentary nature of photography and video’s grasp of time, offering viewers a visual experience in which the boundary between the organic and the artificial grows ever more blurred.
To mark the addition of Doğa Sonrası Etütleri V.2 to SSM’s collections, the artist Murat Durusoy and Dr. Ayşe Aldemir, manager of the Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection, will hold a talk on Saturday 29 November at 14:00, sharing the process of creating and exhibiting the video with visitors. The event is free for museum visitors.
Exhibited with the support of Samsung, the work can be seen in the galleries of the Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection on the upper floor of the Atlı Köşk every day except Monday, from 10:00 to 18:00.
