DREAM 7: How does a nymph feel?

For thirty years, Banu Birecikligil has been painting dreamscapes where human, animal, and myth overlap. Her forests, vegetation, and cities are less places than states of consciousness. Figures trapped in social and personal constraints encounter beings within them that exist beyond alienation.

At the center of the exhibition is her new Struwwelpeter series: three large-scale works on paper that interpret the unwashed, uncombed boy from Heinrich Hoffmann's 1845 children's book—still a symbol of the deterrent example in Germany to this day—as an image of powerlessness and alienation. »I had such a feeling of decay in my own body or in my own soul,« she says about the time of their creation. In Turkish, there is a metaphor for this: the black water that flows into one's legs. In the images, this becomes a vascular system of black fluid, framed by the arum—a plant that smells like decay, is poisonous, and represents death.

The series is executed on paper instead of the usual oil on canvas: more graphic, slower, without the possibility of painting over. A method that Birecikligil has deliberately borrowed from the botanical illustrators of the 17th to 19th centuries — women for whom scientific drawing was one of the few permitted creative mediums.

Before you stands the oil painting »The Night Walk«: a nymph wanders through a nocturnal landscape, next to a house emitting light. The mythical creature becomes the counterpart of alienation — an idea of consciousness that could be free from social oppression and the constraints of one's own ego. »I wonder how animals perceive the world and how they feel and think,« Birecikligil says. »And this whole mythological world of intermediate creatures, between human and animal.«

This is not an esoteric question. Ever since Descartes, Western science has regarded the animal as a machine. It took four hundred years until experiments recently proved the opposite, making it possible to say this again. »You can clearly see that an animal has feelings,« says Birecikligil. Where the willingness for empathy is lacking, everything becomes possible: domination over living beings, over humans, over the entire planet. These are the psychopathic traits of our society.

In the artist's new video collaboration with Tim Ra, the journey of a nymph through witnessed suffering, pain, and tears leads to new growth. The key to this is empathy.

By loading the video, you accept YouTube's privacy policy.
Learn more

Loading video

Unlock YouTube always

»Darkstar« — Video collaboration by Banu Birecikligil and Tim Ra

Fittingly, the exhibition features thematically selected prints from thirty years of painting: Cassandra, who knows everything in advance and whom no one believes, with severed hands on her head. A headless mermaid who is left with two wires instead of arms. A self-portrait entitled »Powerlessness.« Again and again the same figure—a woman who sees and knows and yet cannot act.

The workshop discussion

How are Birecikligil's dream landscapes created? Tim Ra visited Banu Birecikligil in her studio in Bodrum.

By loading the video, you accept YouTube's privacy policy.
Learn more

Loading video

Unlock YouTube always

Banu Birecikligil in her studio in Bodrum

→ Read the full interview: »How does a nymph feel?«

Events in this Dream