Arthere

Meet our resident Liz Cooper, an Associate Professor and Social Sciences Librarian at the University of New Mexico (USA), recently traveled through Greece to interview herbal practictioners about how they acquired their knowledge of herbs. She found that socio-economic shifts in the mid-twentieth century disrupted traditional generation-to-generation knowledge sharing about herbs and today, practitioners are actively rebuilding knowledge through books, libraries, archives, the internet, formal coursework, and local communities of practice. During the residency, she is writing up her research for publication and using her time in Istanbul to explore connections to her Greek fieldwork, hoping to spark future research projects.

İstanbul’da açılış | Yizhen Shen’in “Gece Oyun Alanı” sergisi | Cumartesi, 11 Nisan, 5 pm

Bu bir haftalık sergi, ’in ’daki iki aylık rezidans sürecinde ürettiği resimleri odağına alıyor. Yizhen Shen, Çin‘in Şanghay şehrinden bir ressamdır.

Her bir resim, renk, biçim ve doku arasında kurulan sürekli bir etkileşim ve bunların haz, hayret, hürmet, mizah ve reddediş için taşıyıcılar olarak değişken olasılıkları üzerinden gelişen bir çağrı–yanıt süreciyle ortaya çıkar. İslami hat sanatını çağrıştıran girdaplı şeritler çoğu zaman yüzeyin altındaki katmanlara açılan alanlar olarak okunuyor.

Doom ve “son oyun” anlatılarıyla doygun bir çağda bu resimler, taşkın ve sınır tanımayan bir oyun neşesini, q***r bir tahayyülü ve tuhaf, oyunbaz sapmalarla örülü uzun dolambaçlı yolları benimseyerek canlılığını koruyor. Bu mekânda resim, bir tür gece oyun alanına dönüşüyor. Gece karanlık; ancak oyun sürmeye devam ediyor. Zira kedilerin dışarı çıktığı an tam da bu zaman.

Eser: Yizhen Shen, Wayward Sutra, 2026
Tuval üzerine akrilik
50 × 60 cm

SAVE THE DATE!
Opening in Istanbul | Nightime Playground by Yizhen Shen | April 11, 5pm

This week-long exhibition features a group of paintings completed by during a two-month residency at ArthereIstanbul.

Each painting emerges through a call-and-response process driven by a sustained negotiation of color, shape, texture and their ever-shifting possibilities as vehicles for pleasure, wonder, reverence, humor and refusal. What may appear as swirling ribbons resembling Islamic calligraphy often reveals vistas into buried layers. In a time saturated with doom-and-gloom compulsions and endgame narratives, these paintings insist on exuberance, embracing an ungoverned joy of play, a q***r imagination, and a commitment to long detours that wander off-beat. In this space, painting becomes a kind of nighttime playground. The night is dark, yet we side with play. After all, it is when the cats come out.

Join us for the opening!

Image: Yizhen Shen, Wayward Sutra, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
50 × 60 cm

Welcome our artist in residence Yizhen Shen 沈逸真 (b. Shanghai, China) is a painter currently working in Shanghai. He studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States.

In Shen’s paintings, eccentric shapes swell, tilt, droop, contort, and wiggle, as if teetering on the verge of becoming bodies. They emerge through a slow labor of shifting and revision, dissolving and reforming in a state of perpetual metamorphosis. Drawing on q***r and esoteric visual sources, his work hovers between the mischievous and the mystical. Childlike wonder meets sensual color and off-beat humor, sustaining a practice devoted to the joyous, strange, and magical act of painting. For Shen, painting is an act of losing oneself in the grand bazaar of love.