Aras Seddigh’s solo exhibition NUX 9 will be on view at Galeri Nev İstanbul from January 17 to February 15, 2025. The exhibition presents a narrative that blurs the boundaries between the concepts of “landscape” and “ambience,” offering a fresh perspective on the act of encounter. The gallery space itself is transformed into a walking route, inspired by two photographs taken by the artist years ago. NUX 9 will also feature the release of Seddigh’s new book Koloni Vatos (Colony Vatos), a project she has been developing for the past two years, which brings together her paintings and texts.
The exhibition, intertwining spatial fiction and text, actually began to take shape after the artist’s experimental project Colony N (2022), realized at Galeri Nev İstanbul and the Gazhane Museum – Climate Museum. One of the photographs that inspired the show depicts a vast landscape captured from the top of a hill, while the other captures the ambience of a house in a mountain village through a garden gate. These images evoke two distinct wanderings, tracing the paths and experiences they left behind. Seddigh also draws inspiration from Doppo Kunijida’s Musashino, one of the earliest Japanese works[1] to depict “landscape as landscape” with a conscious awareness, as well as from the subjective exploration of foreign lands in pre-Ottoman travelogues, such as Murat Karasalihoğlu’s Paphlagon to Candar. The exhibition’s aesthetic and conceptual framework is shaped by the metaphor of landscape—not only as a physical and external image but as a “gateway to the inner landscape.”
Seddigh embodies the idea of wandering along a “meandering line”[2] in the transparent space between ambience and landscape, drawing inspiration from the imaginary line that the character in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman randomly traces in the air with a stick. This wandering line is further accompanied by a sound channel that moves through the space. NUX 9[3], the central figure that gives the exhibition its title, symbolizes the search for identity emerging from this fictional wandering. Drawing on Claudio Naranjo’s research in Character and Neurosis, NUX 9 embodies the personality traits of Enneagram Type 9, including inner deafness, withdrawal, conscious indifference, resistance to change, and self-forgetfulness. At its core, NUX 9’s inner journey explores the balance between “finding” and “getting lost,” reflecting the broader narrative of the exhibition.
*Koloni Vatos, designed by Kibele Yarman and published by Dante & Istakoz Publications, can be seen as the mind's attempt to encounter, separate, and synthesize its various selves through a journey across memory spaces.
*Galeri Nev Istanbul is open from Tuesday to Friday between 11.00 - 18.30, and on Saturdays between 12.00 - 18.30.
[1] Kojin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Translated by: Brett de Bary, Duke University Press, 1993.
[2] Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines, Routledge; London and New York, 2015.
[3] The word “Nux” comes from the name of a homeopathic medicine made from the seed of the blackthorn tree called “Nux Vomic”.
