ArtDog Istanbul Issue 31

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

At the End of the Year

As we approach the end of 2025, the world, art, and humanity are still revolving around the same question: Amidst all this noise, speed, and information, what can we really pay attention to?

Ryan Gander, featured on the cover of this issue, speaks directly from the heart of this era. According to him, looking at a painting for a long time is not just an aesthetic experience, but also a form of resistance. Because meaning is formed not in the rapidly flowing images, but in the eye that stops to look. And Gander says something surprising in the midst of all this chaos:

“The world has never been this good.”

When you read the entire interview, you realize this is an ironic statement, almost a warning. Because this sentence also carries an awareness of the approaching end, of exhaustion, of the world changing before our eyes.

The end of 2025 is not just a closing, but also an opportunity to rethink. These years following the pandemic, wars, and crises have pushed us to get lost in speed. But art, on the contrary, wants us to stay in an exhibition hall, in front of a photograph, within a sentence.

The articles in this issue address this conscious slowing down, awareness, perspective, and resistance from different angles: Dick van Zuijlen's interview with the artificial intelligence character ZERO rethinks the boundaries between humans and machines in a poetic dialogue.

Entering its third decade, Autoban explains how contemporary art has established worlds that are indispensable. The transitions it creates between space and time remind us of the spirit of space in contrast to the speed of life.

The "Young or Old?" dossier questions how the new generation of artists weigh production against time, risk against maturity.

The "What Happened in 2025?" dossier records the year's art panorama, spanning from protests to losses, exhibitions to solidarity.

As we enter 2026, the ArtDog Istanbul team's wish is simple but powerful: to continue looking, listening, and understanding. To remember the seriousness of looking at a work of art for a long time, the value of taking time for a word, a sound, an image. Because the most obvious truth that 2025 taught us was this: in a world where everything is quickly erased, the only thing that lasts is attention.

May 2026 bring us all that attention, that depth, that state of remaining human.

Through art, patience, and perseverance.

Şebnem Kırmacı – ArtDog Istanbul Editor-in-Chief

Cover: "The story teller: The sense that you are a part of a flow of a thing," 2025. An animatronic field mouse partially visible through a crack in the gallery wall, 2024 Animatronic mouse, sound, Dimensions variable ©️ Ryan Gander; Courtesy of the artist and Camden Arts Projects, London. Photography: Deniz Güzel

Cover Design: Burcu Ocak

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