In a world woven from speed and endless images, our bodies are quietly resisting the bombardment. With their exhibition Deep Oscillations, Silent Echoes at Labirent Sanat, Arzu Arbak and Aslıhan Kaplan Bayrak place slowing down before us not merely as an ethical and sensory experience, but as a political choice.
Recalling Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s statement that “seeing is a form of touching,” the exhibition repositions bodily sensation, still trembling beneath the flood of data and screens, as an existential point of resistance. The artists issue a call to return from the tyranny of the visual to the silent wisdom of feeling and the body.
Emptiness, Impermanence, and Universal Connection
The works vibrate on the threshold between visibility and erasure, sound and silence, light and darkness. They do not seek permanence; on the contrary, they argue that impermanence forms the very foundation of bodily and sensory awareness.
The Potential of Emptiness
The philosophical core of the exhibition rests on the Buddhist concept of Śūnyatā (emptiness) — not absence, but an infinite field of possibility from which everything arises. The works invite the viewer to witness the vibrating fabric of the universe on both microscopic and macroscopic scales.
Vibrational Being
The visible world is nothing more than a temporary condensation of fundamental oscillations: quantum vibrations of atoms, synaptic waves in the brain, gravitational ripples of stars. The exhibition proposes that we think of existence not as essence, but as vibration.
The Ethics of Waiting
Against the mind’s constant urge to fill every gap, the show advocates “patience in seeing” and, in the spirit of Zen, remaining in a flow where everything passes yet nothing can be permanently grasped.
The exhibition reveals how the everyday details we have rendered invisible through habit — a beam of light striking a wall, the reflection on a door handle — have become the most intense expressions of existence.
Exhibition Information Summary
Artists: Arzu Arbak & Aslıhan Kaplan Bayrak
Title: Deep Oscillations, Silent Echoes
Venue: Labirent Sanat, Istanbul
Dates: 1 November – 20 December 2025
