Bihter Yasemin Adalı’s new exhibition, The World Rises Through Pleasure, opened in early February at Art On Istanbul. Moving between personal and collective memory, wakefulness and dream, her work often inhabits spaces that feel both intimate and elusive. We spoke with Adalı about the ideas shaping her practice and this latest body of work. The exhibition runs until 28 March.

 

AN UPWARD PULL 

 

The title The World Rises Through Pleasure carries both a visceral and existential tension. What does it represent for you today?

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In a way, the title is a dialogue with the “fatigue society” and the pleasure-driven culture of consumption that Byung-Chul Han describes. Today, pleasure is often treated as something fleeting—an object of momentary relief. For me, however, The World Rises Through Pleasure suggests that pleasure is not merely an escape, but a possibility for renewal. Drawing upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s insights in The Pleasure of Drawing, I view the artistic act as a sequence of formation, deformation, and reformation. Through this process, we reach a moment of transformation where the self and the work enter a state of flux. To find pleasure in this "becoming" is to resist the exhaustion of the achievement-subject and to embrace a life-affirming vitality.

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It recalls the sacred dimension of the body and an upward pull, a tension between earth and sky. In contrast to an increasingly digital and disembodied way of living, it points to a moment when the senses awaken and the body reconnects with the world through its own weight and desire.

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The idea of liminality, existing on a threshold seems to run throughout the exhibition. How does this condition appear in your work?

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A threshold is a space where we are neither fully inside nor fully outside—an uneasy but potential-filled zone. In my practice, this often appears through figures that never fully reveal themselves or through spaces that remain deliberately undefined.

 

From a Heideggerian perspective, it is the space where being both reveals and conceals itself. I like to connect this idea to the critique that the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray directs at Western philosophy. Irigaray argues that philosophy has long understood existence as something solid, grounded and constructed, while forgetting the fluid, invisible and vital element that makes everything possible: air, the space of breath.

 

In my paintings, the layering and later scraping away of paint—along with images such as drifting curtains or candles waiting to be blown out on a cake—are attempts to crack openings of space where the soul can breathe.

 

For me, the act of making is neither pure destruction nor pure construction. It unfolds in the fragile balance between the two: an attempt to reintroduce the feminine presence of the air element into the solidity of matter.

 

THESE ARE “PSYCHOLOGICAL READY-MADES”

 

Objects that extend beyond the surface of the painting—dominoes, punching bags, telephone receivers—belong to everyday life yet feel strangely unsettling. How do you think about these objects?

 

For me, these are “psychological ready-mades”. Dominoes symbolise interconnected destinies and the inevitable collapse—or transformation—that begins with a single touch. The punching bag is a somatic image: it represents both the violence we are exposed to and the bodily resilience that absorbs it. The telephone receiver, meanwhile, feels like a remnant of unheard voices, broken communication and the deep loneliness within today’s digital noise.

 

The garden metaphor in the exhibition moves between rooting, decay and transformation. In today’s atmosphere of speed and uncertainty, is it still possible to be “rooted”?

 

Rooting should not be understood as a fixed position but rather as a sense of belonging in motion—being nourished by the deeper layers of one’s own existence. In the fluid and fragmented structure of our time, rooting may no longer be about the soil itself but about trusting the cycle of decay and transformation. A garden does not only bloom; it also withers and turns into compost. A seed waiting in a pot does not always sprout. To root oneself is to surrender to this cycle—to the ancient rhythm within uncertainty. In an age defined by speed, slowing down and walking towards one’s potential rather than running towards it may in fact be the most genuine form of rooting.

 

The small cabin where dreams are shared anonymously feels like one of the most fragile moments in the exhibition. What role do dreams play in your practice?

 

Dreams are where the collective unconscious speaks in its most exposed form. In my practice, I do not treat dreams as a kind of database but rather as an emotional residue. The anonymous cabin becomes a space of confession where the personal meets the public. It draws on the tradition of dream interpretation but filters it through a contemporary psychoanalytic lens—sometimes even bypassing interpretation altogether, allowing the act of overhearing to take precedence.

 

Dreaming is an experience in which logic falls silent and images take over. Listening to one dream after another while observing the paintings through the window of the cabin creates an unexpected intimacy between viewers, while also opening a subtle dialogue between the paintings and the dreams themselves.