{"id":10453,"date":"2026-09-13T16:44:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T14:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lovelab.berlin\/?post_type=dream&p=10453"},"modified":"2026-09-13T18:37:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T16:37:38","slug":"banu-birecikligil","status":"publish","type":"dream","link":"https:\/\/lovelab.berlin\/en\/dreams\/banu-birecikligil\/","title":{"rendered":"DREAM 7: How does a nymph feel?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014still a symbol of the deterrent example in Germany to this day\u2014as an image of powerlessness and alienation. \u00bbI had such a feeling of decay in my own body or in my own soul,\u00ab 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\u2014a plant that smells like decay, is poisonous, and represents death.<\/p>\n

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\u00bbStruwwelpeter\u00ab, Plates I\u2013III | Mixed media on paper, each approx. 100 \u00d7 150 cm | 2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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 \u2014 women for whom scientific drawing was one of the few permitted creative mediums.<\/p>\n

Before you stands the oil painting \u00bbThe Night Walk\u00ab: a nymph wanders through a nocturnal landscape, next to a house emitting light. The mythical creature becomes the counterpart of alienation \u2014 an idea of consciousness that could be free from social oppression and the constraints of one's own ego. \u00bbI wonder how animals perceive the world and how they feel and think,\u00ab Birecikligil says. \u00bbAnd this whole mythological world of intermediate creatures, between human and animal.\u00ab<\/p>\n

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\u00bbThe Night Walk\u00ab | Oil on canvas, 150 \u00d7 100 cm | 2020<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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. \u00bbYou can clearly see that an animal has feelings,\u00ab 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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