20. 05. 2026 – 24.05.2026

I have been involved in the restoration process at the Istanbul University Zoology Museum for nearly a year/ I have orked with many species that have lost their vitality but who had once lived. Throughout this process, I often felt as though I was watching over themprotecting them. Repairing missing eyes, ears, and claws led me to reflect on what it might mean to restore a sense of wholeness to these beings—almost as if giving them life again. 

Each story I encountered during this time prompted me to question the museum itself, the histories of the species preserved within it, and my own presence there. At the same time, an uncontrollable desire to protect became intertwined with the urge to sustain the museum. This text emerges precisely from that affective field: from the desire to protect, repair, bear witness, and bring something into being once more. 

The artists in the exhibition attempt to become the voice, the place, and the home of the animal in different ways. Together, we reconsidered the living conditions of each species and sought to make their voices heard again. This is not merely an exhibition, but an attempt—an exploration of the existential conditions of becoming another kind of living being. 

This effort aims to challenge the limits of an anthropocentric perspective and to explore the possibilities of approaching other forms of life. The intention is not to fully inhabit the position of the animal or to claim to represent its experience completely. Rather, it is to approach this position while acknowledging the impossibility of doing so. 

Each work can be understood as an effort to listen to another being’s world—to sense its space, its fragility, its memory, and the transformations it has undergone. Each artist seeks to rethink the distance between the human and the non-human, to make visible the forms of domination that emerge within this distance, and to trace the possibilities of more ethical relations with other species. 

Artists: Ozan Atalan, Didem Erbaş, Ali Kanal, Gürkan Kurtbay, Jonathan Perez, Banu Çiçek Tülü, Merve Ünsal. 

Facilitators: Biologist Gonca Yeşilyurt, Biologist Kerem Kaleli 

Text and Exhibition Organization: Didem Erbaş 

Graphics: Ozan Atalan 

Spatial Gestures and Design: Didem Erbaş, Gülüm İmrat, Gürkan Kurtbay