Artist: Eda Sütunç

Sanatorium Tophane hosts Eda Sütunç’s solo exhibition Sıcak Prova (Warm Rehearsal). Bringing together sculpture, photography, video, installation, and text, the exhibition explores different ways of being in the world through carrying, relationality, and fragility.

Sütunç’s work questions normative value systems structured around perfection and productivity, while proposing speculative forms of kinship. Centering the right to exist, this approach develops an alternative to performative regimes that define productivity solely through outcomes. Moving through ritual, repetition, and oscillation, the works interrogate the limits of carrying and ask whether relationality remains possible even in moments of not being able to carry.

The artist approaches the body not as a site of representation, but as a ground where thinking, testing, and transformation take place. Sütunç's process-oriented practice positions production as an autonomous mode of research, forming the backbone of the exhibition.

Sıcak Prova redefines the act of carrying beyond a physical movement, as an ethical and affective practice. Here, “load” is not merely weight; it carries meanings of responsibility, care, and interdependence. The exhibition reconsiders relations between human and non-human life forms through fragility and discontinuity, proposing the act of making space in the world as a mode of practice.

Rather than presenting a closed and predetermined narrative, Sıcak Prova proposes new modes of relationality shaped by fragility and moving with uncertainty. Sütunç’s works invite the viewer not only to witness, but to reconsider their own capacity to carry, the relations they form, and how they make space in the world. Through entanglement with endangered species, as well as forms of life whose existence is rendered precarious within dominant systems, the exhibition invites the viewer to become part of a symbiotic network grounded in consent, trust, and interdependence.

The public program accompanying the exhibition aims to expand its conceptual framework through discussion, encounters, and collective thinking.