meeting in the forest

Meeting in the Forest is an online exhibition created by Jennifer İpekel, Merve İşeri, Goia Mujalli, Katy Pinke, Eda Şarman. The exhibition was intended to be held at Pablo’s Birthday Gallery in New York throughout the summer of 2020. Given the circumstances surrounding Covid-19, we decided to host the gathering via an online space as an extension of Pablo’s Birthday—until we are able to be together again. As a group we gather around themes of interconnectedness and interdependency. Our first collaboration was a celebration of rivers—a performance piece called Tide Between Us.

With Meeting in the Forest, we bring our individual works together in a collaboratively built online space. Responding to concerns that have arisen out of the Covid-19 outbreak, we hope to revive feelings of unity and solidarity—with an invitation to meet in the forest, as a literal and metaphorical place. Jung’s “forest” represents a collective unconscious. Beneath the surface of reality, he writes, there is a shared forest: “A million separate paths lead into one terrain. Instead of dreaming our private dreams, we are tapping into an elemental experience. This verges on mysticism and magic.”

Meeting in the Forest dives beneath the waves, looking for our shared depths. How can our union wake us up in this living dream, helping us to see more lucidly?

They communicate telepathically with other beings and with flora and fauna, a phenomenon called ‘mindstretch’ that requires traits associated in cultural ecofeminist thought with the feminine : ‘meaningful communication’, a lesson goes, ‘is the meeting of two vessels, equally vulnerable, equally receptive and equally desirous of hearing.’ Earthtouch is a ritual that uses mindstretching to send energy drawn from Earth by one being to another in need of this energy. Combined, mindstretch and earthtouch represent a dynamic, deep ecological, spiritual and communicative web of interdependencies between one vessel and another vessel to nonhuman nature.

adapted from Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains by Cassie Chambers

“The most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive”.

from The Hidden Life of Trees

by Peter Wohlleben

The above has been inspiration for this collective project’s research. We are five artists whose works are interconnected through material, context and spirituality. The main idea here is to create a space for the flourishing of ideas around solidarity, collectivity, and inclusiveness. With the interconnected dream of the forest as our metaphor, this show hopes to bring into clearer awareness how the dimension of reality and the dimension of dreams are interconnected.

Merve İşeri's paintings depict inner landscapes exploring the modes of language through the communication between nature, human and culture using personal and archetypal allegories.

BA Politecnico di Milano

Katy Pinke’s practice explores possibility in the translation of uncharted, liminal emotional and spiritual terrains. Her evil twin Katy Cruel composed and recorded Kiss at the Edgeless Bowl, the sound piece floating in the exhibition space.

BA Princeton University

MFA Rose Bruford College, London

Eda Şarman's practice evolves on the intersection of architecture, phenomenology and tentacular thinking, proposing to perceive place as an active/fleshy organism. Place, the ground of our interconnected

↭interdependent life. Eda’s works find themselves in an endeavor to trespass a linear understanding of time and an isolated perception of space.

BArch Pratt Institute

MA in Moving Image Royal College of Art

Goia Mujalli'works with intuition, colour, rhythm and movement, whilst memories of the tropics appear and begin to guide the decision-making. Her motivation is to create paintings with a particular research interest in celebrating tropical plants. Goia is a Brazilian born artist who lives and works in London.

BA Slade School of Fine Art

MA in Painting Royal College of Art

Jennifer İpekel's work travels through the body and to the core of the soul, investigating the endless inner landscapes, the ever-changing seasons and the dimensions of the soul that belong to a non-place, a place of neutrality. A society without a state which lies at the zero point of polar differentiation. The idea of a society without a state represents the inner resonance of the being, bizarre plants, micro organisms, creatures, Saturn, a myth of liberation.

BA Parsons School of Design

MA Chelsea School of Art

From compassion, we can generate community. To put it crudely, we didn't get into this mess alone, and we can't get out of it alone. We need sustained support, both to mount resistance and to enact our visions of renewal, support that itself embodies the deep value we recognize in each other.

from Dreaming the Dark by Starhawk