Just like clouds, leaves make the wind visible; without the rustling of leaves, and the movement of clouds, we would be left face to face with the unsettling depth of the void.*
Fulya Çetin’s solo exhibition Growing with the Wind takes place at Galeri Nev Istanbul between 23 January – 14 March 2026. The exhibition brings together works shaped by the traces of the life the artist has built in close contact with nature after leaving the city and moving to Olympos, Antalya. The long-term relationship established with plants, trees, and the wind finds both a physical and a sensory resonance in this exhibition. Growing with the Wind unfolds in a two-part structure, accompanied by Çetin’s long-term video Witches of the Forest (2025). While the first part of the exhibition can be viewed until 21 February, the video will be presented as part of the second part between 24 February – 14 March.
Embracing an artistic practice grounded in chance, fluidity, and dialogue - one that draws its strength from experimentation in both thought and material - Fulya Çetin has developed a body of work shaped by trees, plants, and the emotions experienced through her life intertwined with nature in Olympos. Time spent there, forest walks, the changing of seasons and weather, the direction and intensity of the wind all contribute to a language that, from the outset, has been interwoven with feminist perspectives and feminine life practices. Rather than representing nature through imagery, this language focuses on modes of coexisting with it. Çetin conceives her non-dominant and non-directive relationship with nature not only as an ecological stance but also as the imagination of an alternative way of being for social life. Within this framework, the delicate balance between intervention and withdrawal emerges as one of the fundamental characteristics of her practice.
The process that began with the trees planted in her garden in Olympos growing, intertwining, and eventually being pruned evolved into traces left on paper by “re-raising” parts from plants such as black pepper, mimosa, and hollyhock. This period also makes visible the conceptual and material process that culminated in her 2023 exhibition Ölüm Yokmuş (Death Never Was) at Den Art. The approach of Death Never Was, which centers transformation rather than disappearance, and regrowth rather than cutting, can be said to form the conceptual and formal ground of Growing with the Wind. In these encounters, nature ceases to be an object or a visual source and instead emerges as a living presence, an atmosphere considered together with temporality, transformation, and continuity. Within Çetin’s artistic language, vegetal forms become more than formal elements; they turn into silent carriers of a search for coexistence, equality, and justice. Fluidity and vitality thus enable a mode of production based on relationships rather than representation.
In her exhibition at Galeri Nev Istanbul, the artist transfers plant traces - usually encountered on paper - onto vegan silk fabrics produced in Bursa. While following a process in which plants collected from nature are imprinted onto surfaces, these fabrics, obtained through an alternative to traditional silkworm production, are presented as an ethical and sustainable extension of the relationship established with nature. Moreover, the semi-translucent and tactile quality of silk conveys the invisible movement of the wind onto the surface, evoking the swaying of branches and the sensation of a growing inner forest. Here, branches carry not the movement of a single tree but the memory of existing together, and the viewer encounters not a landscape to be observed but a space to be passed through.
In the second part of the exhibition, the female body and the tree trunk, hair swaying in the wind and fluttering leaves, open up a zone of contact between inner and outer forests. Filmed at Ekşidere Mountain Thermal Springs and produced by maumau, the video focuses on an intense and enigmatic atmosphere created by bodies that move with the wind while remaining in place. These bodies evoke a feminine stance that protects its space through presence - one that is in exchange with the wind, persistently standing, and recalling polyvocality and solidarity.
Growing with the Wind proposes standing alongside nature, being-with bodies, observing, and thinking together, while seeking to open a quiet yet powerful space of encounter. Here, as throughout the artist’s practice, nature continues to appear not merely as a visual source but as a shared field in which death, transformation, and continuity are thought together.
*Latife Tekin, Ormanda Ölüm Yokmuş. Istanbul: Can Publications, 2019, p.21