“The ‘new materialism’ is the most common name given to a series of movements in several fields that criticise anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the selforganizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and commend the need to fold a planetary dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics.”
William.E.Connolly
New Materialism is the main area where I develop my thoughts and transform them into my artworks. In 2019, I wrote my master thesis in the light of New Materialisms to analyze the materiality of language in conceptual art. For the new materialists, the agency of matter is a key notion that is as essential as the agency of humans. The active-passive relations between humans and things are denied by the new materialists. In this context, humans are also things. The New Materialisms offer a new ontological way to view things resulting in critique of Descartism. The notion of things does not need a form to occupy space at a certain time. It can be, in other words, fields of force or energy. Also, the relations among things can be considered as the energies flowing invisibly from one field to another. Thus, in my painting, I try to open the bodies of the figures and paint them as fields in order to reconstruct the relations between humans and space, especially the natural environment around them.
This interpretation of the obscure and contingent relations between humans and nature shows an anthropocentrism attitude. It can also be used to see the current situation caused by the corona virus – the tiny virus, occupying so less space, now is able to reveal its invisible enormous thing-power to the human community. This is an integral part of my recent works.