Cobalt Night from the studio of Melis Buyruk.

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Leila Heller Gallery is featuring Turkish artist Melis Buyruk’s new collection of works titled The Bloom Room (opened April 26). It is being shown in its pop-up kiosk across from the gallery’s permanent space at Warehouse 87 in Alserkal Avenue.

Buyruk explores man’s relationship with Nature. Sad to say, since the 18th century, when modern man began to progress industrially and technologically, he acquired the habit of looking around to measure his success by what he had subjugated in Nature. Nature and all its elements became mere raw material for the industrial progress of humanity. A cultural factor also crept into ties with Nature, since an individual’s or country’s development and social standing began to be mapped in inverse proportion to the volume of natural wealth extracted from the environment.

Due to the division between Nature and culture, plants and animals lost their mystical and spiritual meanings and became only utilities for technological development. However, the departure from mankind’s roots also alienated man’s relation with Nature.

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Though critically dependent on the laws of Nature, man is also connected to the world of culture he has created. He has thus created a parallel – or even virtual – living space outside his natural habitat. This has made him even more prone to treat Nature as a commodity than as a part of himself.

We are of course inseparable from Nature - our bodies, lives and minds depend on the air we breathe and the food we eat. The earth sustains our very life force. Without the earth - without Nature - what would we be? Through her works, Buyruk tries to put a full stop to mankind’s pell mell “progress”. She reviews our relations with Nature. “I am constructing an alternative living space,” she says, “which I assume has disappeared (due to the) the dominance that man has established over Nature and other living species at the expense of destroying them.

“I am very sorry that there is not much I can do beyond highlighting environmental issues with my creative output and making small, well-intentioned modifications to my personal lifestyle. But I hope that does inspire thought.” Her dissertation work – which is included in Istanbul’s Rahmi M. Koc Museum – enabled her to understand the devastating impact of climate change and pollution on the ocean and marine-based life forms. It solidified her connection to Nature. “We tend to forget that we really do belong to Nature,” she says. “As a human, it makes me sad to think about what we’ve done to our planet.”

  Melis Buyruk smiles at the world.

Buyruk identifies and subtly blends patterns of vegetation and the natural world, creating porcelain flower fields. They are disorienting, as they evoke both artificiality and illusion in a play on logic. While strikingly realistic and incredibly meticulous, the flowers are unfeasibly monochrome, hybrid and eerily level, suggesting an alien environment.

The pieces fluctuate between the boundaries of reality and surreality, representation and distortion, mirroring both reality and created realities and radiating an uncanny but nevertheless appealing atmosphere. As a result, the spectator finds himself shifting between the knowing and not-knowing elements in her sculptures. “I think that juxtaposing our age-old, biologically rendered fears with our socially conditioned admiration for flowers is an interesting notion,” she says.

There is no fixity in our perceptions of the works. Our discernment oscillates, allowing us to view the subject from many angles. It makes new understandings of our natural world possible; it could be the first step towards alternative insights in the way we live with the environment around us, becoming the beginning of personal change.

The show aims to remind the viewer of his fractured and disjointed relationship with Nature. It should possibly provoke him to have a more judicious approach to her. Buyruk noted that while being quarantined in her home because of the coronavirus pandemic, she was thinking about the instability of people’s control over Nature. “What we experienced during the pandemic process enabled us to face the weaknesses of the human species again,” she said.

She admires the works of Belgian multidisciplinary artist, playwright, stage director, choreographer and designer, Jan Fabre. The delicate relationship of his work with beauty and death, fascinates her. She is a perfectionist. “If I am not satisfied with my work,” she says, “I will break sections of my sculpture with a hammer. I am also a patient person who will spend many, many hours fixing those areas.”

She wants to explain her artistic narrative in a way that underscores the importance of beauty in her works. That is why she always use 18k gold luster in her sculpture, imbuing it with added value. She works hard, trying to find new details, shapes, forms and displaying methods, so that her sculptures always look original rather than repetitive.

Born in Golcuk, Turkey, in 1984, she became a specialist in her craft at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Selcuk University. Leila Heller Gallery, besides gaining worldwide recognition as a pioneer in promoting a creative dialogue and exchange between Western artists and Middle Eastern, Central and South Asian artists, has won a reputation for identifying and cultivating the careers of artists who leave a lasting impact on contemporary art and culture. In 2015, it opened its first international location in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue, and at 16,000 square feet, it is the largest gallery in the UAE.