Staying with the Landscape
Duygu Toprak
Duygu Toprak holds a BCP in City and Regional Planning from Middle East Technical University (TR) and an MSc in Human Geography and Planning from Utrecht University (NL). Her curatorial interests grow from an interdisciplinary practice rooted in research, spatial politics, and editorial work. Supported by the European Cultural Foundation, she led Ortaklaşa (2019–2024), a multi-platform project exploring urban commons. Her recent publication, “Nurturing Community: Commoning and Care in Güneşköy,” appears in Architecture(s) of Care (LetteraVentidue, 2024), as part of a research project funded by Northumbria University. She has explored curating as a means to foreground protest and collective authorship in After Shell, where she co-edited a critical calendar on extractivism exhibited at the We Are Warming Up Festival (Amsterdam), and in 5199, a pop-up exhibition on animal rights at UNITE (Ankara). She is currently completing a curatorial training programme and works as studio manager to a contemporary artist.
Beyza Durhan completed her BA, MA, and PhD in Painting at Hacettepe University (TR). She has lived and worked in Şırnak since 2020. Beyza’s work is situated at the intersection of conceptual art, ecological materialism, and posthuman storytelling. She explores the relationships between humans, nature, and material through time-based processes and organic substances such as bioplastics and beeswax. She often collaborates with living systems and non-human actors to create fragile, process-driven installations. She treats documentation as a form of witnessing rather than authorship, drawing attention to decay, transformation, and coexistence. Her practice engages ecological thinking, posthuman futures, and the porous boundaries between bodies, species, and territories.
Duygu and Beyza met through Together at the Threshold, a programme for artists and curators organized by CultureCIVIC, an EU initiative for arts and culture in Turkey.
A corral somewhere in the future. A corral in the middle of a huge landscape, and behind it a gentle but massive mountain. Wings are circling in the air. Everyone's landscape is changing every moment. What can we learn by accompanying landscapes, rather than extracting from them?
This proposal builds on an ongoing conversation between researcher-curator Duygu Toprak and artist-academic Beyza Durhan, whose practice explores biomaterials, interspecies collaboration, and shifting perceptions of landscape. In our artist–curator dialogue, we prioritize process, mirroring Beyza's creation of materials and collaboration with living beings. Her work with non-human species and biomaterials shapes her conceptual construct, where materials and ideas are inseparable. The process is mutually transforming, harmonizing (or even disconnecting) to produce a shared outcome. This opens up questions: how might such practices be exhibited and read? What curatorial approaches can be equally attentive to material processes?
We want to document and reflect on a research project that prioritizes the process around these questions. Together, we are developing a way of working that is situated and dialogic, through field visits, shared observation, material research, and documentation. Our collaboration takes place in Hakkari-Şırnak, a politically complex and ecologically vulnerable region where Beyza lives and works, and engages in apiculture. Rather than working toward an exhibition as an endpoint, we see the project as a slow, evolving study that is open to experimentation. We want to concretize the result of the collaboration of two disciplines that move in and out each other's spaces through material research, writing, documenting and experimental mapping.
We see this collaboration as a potential method. With support from LINA, we hope to deepen its scope, and open it to broader dialogue on how artistic-curatorial practice can engage multispecies processes and shifting landscapes.