A Disenchanted World

One of the fundamental assumptions of the modern world is that, through reason and science, humankind can explain, measure, and govern nature. While this transformation has diminished fear in the face of the unknown, it has also contributed to the dissolution of the relationship between human beings, nature, myth, and the sacred. The “nature stripped of its gods” evoked in Friedrich Schiller’s 1788 poem The Gods of Greece is an early expression of this loss. Schiller, however, does not propose a return to the ancient gods, rather, he suggests that these beings can now survive only within the realms of poetry and imagination. This constitutes an early aesthetic proposition that art might preserve relationships of meaning lost to the modern world. Max Weber, in turn, describes the expansion of rationalisation and calculability into ever broader areas of life through the concept of the “disenchantment of the world.” The loss of enchantment to which Weber refers is not simply the withdrawal of faith or the sacred. As the world becomes increasingly calculable through science, bureaucracy, capitalism, and technical reason, shared frameworks for deciding what to value, how to live, and how human beings should relate to other forms of existence also begin to weaken.

Today, the conversion of emotions, preferences, and everyday movements into data, and the recording and prediction of behaviour by algorithms, make this process even more visible. Ecological destruction and the instrumentalisation of the relationships that human beings establish with their own bodies, with nature, and with other living beings add new layers to Weber’s diagnosis.

A Disenchanted World asks what it might mean to turn once again towards myths, rituals, ancient symbols, and diIerent forms of belief within this rationalised order. This turn is not understood as a desire to return to the past or to reconstruct a lost sacred age. Rather, it points towards other possibilities of relation and thought that emerge where existing modes of explanation prove insuIicient. Instead of simply repeating ancient images, the artists reconfigure them through their own bodies, memories, geographies, and lived time.

In the exhibition, images that resonate across diIerent cultures -snakes, birds, water, stones, plants, eyes, caves, hybrid bodies, the underworld, healing, and rebirth- are not confined to singular and immutable meanings. The snake may signify both poison and healing, the bird may evoke freedom as well as the messenger or the captive, the eye may suggest surveillance as much as protection. As these images are released from fixed meanings, they enter into new relationships with personal memory, collective narratives, gender, vulnerability, and contemporary political tensions. Myth thus ceases to be a closed narrative that explains the past and becomes a mobile field through which to understand the present and imagine worlds that do not yet exist.

Within this framework, animism is approached not as a romantic tendency to attribute a human- like spirit to everything in nature, but as a way of thinking about the human alongside other living beings, objects, materials, and unseen forces. Nature ceases to be a passive landscape or a consumable resource situated outside the human real, it becomes a field of reciprocal relations among people, animals, plants, minerals, waters, and objects. Moving away from the idea of the human as the sole subject at the centre of the world also requires us to reconsider care, responsibility, and coexistence.

Within this relational perspective, ritual is not limited to the repetition of a particular practice. It becomes a contemporary artistic language that gives form to experiences of encounter, mourning, care, healing, and transformation. Intuition, embodied memory, dreams, and imagination are not positioned in opposition to rational thought, but are understood as other ways of knowing that may coexist with it. Art opens a space in which research and intuition, personal experience and collective narrative, the material and the unseen can exist side by side.

A Disenchanted World does not claim that art can restore a lost sacred realm or return the world to a mythical wholeness. Re-enchantment here involves taking several steps back from the belief that we fully know and control the world. It proposes looking at something without immediately naming, explaining, and exhausting it, and recognising the realms of non-human beings, materials, and experiences. By temporarily suspending the idea that the world has been fully explained, the exhibition makes room for mystery, intuition, and imagination. Re-enchantment thus becomes not an escape, but an opportunity to rethink our relationship with the world in a more attentive, permeable, and plural way.

The paintings Distance and The One Who Knows by Ayşenur Şentürk situate the human figure amid dark rocks, caves, water, and encounters with animals. Rather than remaining a passive backdrop representing nature, the landscape becomes an active component of the unconscious, fear, and transformation. The cave appears as a void that both shelters and draws one inward, while water becomes a surface of passage between life and the unknown. Snakes and birds in contact with the figures unsettle the boundary between human and animal, simultaneously carrying opposing associations of wisdom, threat, guidance, and rebirth.

A similar ambiguity turns towards the body in Ali Şentürk’s Kırmızı Özetler series. The painting approaches the body not as a complete and clearly bounded whole, but as a fragile structure continually altered through touch. At times the hands support the figure, at others, they become a force that covers, constrains, or shapes it. As translucent layers of red attempt to reveal an essence presumed to lie beneath the skin, they blur the boundaries between protection and exposure, intimacy and intervention. The body thus ceases to belong solely to itself and becomes a relational field that is fragmented, transformed, and reconstituted through contact with others.

Okyanus Çağrı Çamcı’s Glass Heart, this vulnerability is carried outside the body. Lying upside down within a natural landscape, the figure holds a glass heart in the palm of their hand. Bringing outside what would normally be expected to remain within and protected leaves the figure open and vulnerable to the world. Although the inverted body evokes a fall, it does not fall, instead, it settles into its position and alters the customary sense of orientation. As the body’s orientation changes, so does the appearance of the surrounding world. The work treats vulnerability not as a condition to be overcome, but as a condition for moving through and relating to the world diIerently. Older narratives of guilt, obedience, and exclusion constructed around the female body open onto diIerent trajectories in Kezban Arca Batıbeki’s WADJET and Serpil Yeter’s Lilith.

WADJET separates the snake from its role as a symbol of sin and evil in monotheistic narratives, reconnecting it with ancient wisdom, healing, creative power, and the cycle of life. Through a layered language of sequins, beads, and varied surfaces, the union between woman and snake acquires a presence that is at once seductive and uncanny. Lilith, meanwhile, centres the female figure who refuses obedience, making visible the return of what has been excluded and demonised. In these two works, myth ceases to be an immutable inheritance of history and becomes a political and embodied field that can be reread from within patriarchal regimes of meaning.

CANAN’s Vuslat draws Burak, a figure from Islamic mythology, closer to an earthly desire: the reunion of lovers. The lace-like structure woven from copper wire brings together the knowledge of filigree and handicraft within a sculptural body. In this interpretation, Burak’s sacred function of carrying its rider into the divine realm gives way to longing and the desire for intimacy between human beings. The shadow cast on the wall creates a second image between prayer and body, sky and earth.

Pinprick’s Self and Arkhe Series No. 7 bring ideas of cosmogony, origin, and transformation into a contemporary world of images shaped through craft. Eggs, entwined snakes, vegetal patterns, and animal figures resist binding the idea of beginnings to a single creation narrative. Embroidery, punch needle, and handwork propose a mode of making and remembering that unfolds over time, in contrast to the speed of the digital age. Repetitive movement becomes not merely a technique for producing form, but an embodied relationship with time and material.

Bawer Doğanay’s Nîqaş turns towards Mardin’s gradually disappearing tradition of woodblock printing and Nasra Teyze, one of its last practitioners. When motifs drawn from the region’s stone carvings are transferred onto wood, the architectural surface begins to circulate among printmaking, painting, and craft. The accompanying print carries the trace of the carved surface onto another support, making visible the ways memory is copied, eroded, and transmitted. Here, re-enchantment emerges not from turning forms of the past into decorative quotation, but from renewing contact with endangered knowledge and with the gestures of the hands that carry it.

Betül Özkan’s Diptych consists of two organic forms made from thread and adhesive. Although they appear separate, the two elements move within a single dialogue. Fibres that shift direction across the surface evoke the folds and layers of nature while also carrying traces of an embodied or inward movement. Rather than forcing the material into a predetermined form, the artist allows its own tendencies and resistance to enter the process of production. Memories, pain, love, and desire are felt without being directly represented in the space between the two forms. This space becomes less a site of separation than one of mutual attraction and an unfinished relationship.

Hande Dilaver’s installation Bir Kapsülün İçinde Arşiv brings together, in small bottles, plants that the artist has collected from diIerent regions of Türkiye since 2022. Recalling the order of scientific classification, the cabinet becomes an open-ended archive bearing traces of personal encounters, geographies, and vegetal life. Here the plant is not a specimen to be named and fixed, but a being understood through its reciprocal relationship with the artist. Maintaining the tension between preservation and confinement, the capsule quietly challenges both the neutrality of the archive and the transformation of nature into an object of knowledge that can be possessed. In Dilaver’s wall hanging Müdahale, the relationship between human beings and nature is explored through abandonment and regeneration. In the collage on natural fabric, the artist’s decisions are joined by the processes of paint, dried plants, and other materials in forming the surface. A permeable space thus opens between control and spontaneous transformation. The possibility that nature might reconstitute itself in the void left by human intervention forms both the material and conceptual ground of the work.

The works Işıl Işıl Dere and Yaban Zaman by Nazlı Gürlek Hodder bring the temporalities of water, stone, earth, and body together within the same ritual configuration. Water held in earthen vessels extending through the gallery and pebbles millions of years old that resemble parts of the human body become carriers of shared memory through intentions whispered by visitors. In Yaban Zaman, a symbol drawn with mud from a stream bed transforms the human hand from an instrument that dominates nature into a gesture that comes into contact with the knowledge of water and earth.

The supposedly neutral appearance of the white cube is interrupted by this installation, opening the space onto a stream bed, a votive site, and a participatory route through memory.

In the painterly universe that unfolds around Düş Kökleri, Isırılmış Elmaya Yolculuk, and Döngü Kırıcı by Hilal Can, fire, water, snakes, apples, roots, and wounds appear as mutable elements of a personal mythology. The images do not function like a fixed dictionary, their meanings shift according to the relationships they establish with one another. The dreamlike spaces the artist constructs through intense colour bring individual memory into contact with collective narratives, treating the self as a process of fragmentation and reconstruction. In this universe, where fire is connected to the past, water to the present, and roots to the unconscious, transformation is not a threshold crossed once and left behind, but an inner movement experienced again and again.

The spatial configuration of the exhibition also develops as an extension of these relationships. The works are not separated by the conventional empty spaces and safe distances of the white cube, in places, they draw close to one another and are installed almost as if intertwined. The small gallery thus evokes a shrine, a nest, or a dense field of memory rather than a neutral shell for display. Instead of viewing the works sequentially and from a distance, visitors move among them, becoming more aware of the scale of their own bodies and of their proximity to the works and to one another.

The juxtaposition of these works does not define enchantment as a lost wholeness or an innocent past to which we might return. Re-enchantment here proposes suspending the assumption that reason, science, or the achievements of modernity constitute the only valid modes of understanding, rather than rejecting them. Enchantment makes itself felt in the time held by a stone, the memory of a dried plant, the repetitive movement of a craft, the inverted orientation of a body, or the contemporary political meaning of an ancient myth.

A Disenchanted World temporarily suspends the idea that the world has been fully explained and exhausted. In making room for mystery, intuition, imagination, and other ways of knowing, it also moves away from seeing the human as the sole subject at the centre of the world. From this perspective, rather than becoming mysterious once again, the world is felt as relational, permeable, fragile, and tangible.