FW Spotlight: Top Submissions of May 2025
Every so often, we find ourselves longing for a refuge, not a place, but an idea. A nest that keeps the noise of the world at bay, a system that won’t collapse under the weight of time, a light that no longer confuses the moths. But what happens when that refuge is made of circuits, when the home behaves like a machine, or when insects roam through servers as if through the branches of a forest?
This month’s exhibitions, evim yuva by Barış Çavuşoğlu, PC Gamer by Nestor Siré, and Bug by Guo Cheng, move through this uncertain terrain, where domestic memory, collective ingenuity, and digital-ecological hybrids converge. Each show deconstructs the idea of home as a place of belonging, revealing it instead as a system: fragile, interconnected, fallible, and alive.
In a world where the boundaries between inside and outside, human and machine, nature and technology grow increasingly blurred, these works offer no fixed maps. Instead, they teach us how to dwell in the fractures, to seek connection in the glitch, and to understand that even wires can carry childhood stories.
Barış Çavuşoğlu’s evim yuva at BENTA, Istanbul (25/04/2025 – 15/06/2025)
What does it mean to feel safe, to feel “held” by a space? In evim yuva (“my home is a nest”), Barış Çavuşoğlu orchestrates an architectural lullaby: a domestic machine that hums with memory and longing, precision and loss. The house is no longer a passive structure but a sentient cradle, a soft intelligence that wishes only to protect.
Drawing from the artist’s own upbringing amidst the functional beauty of engineer parents’ tools and mechanisms, the exhibition builds a home as a perfectly synchronized organism. Two central sculptures, equal parts suburban nostalgia and techno-futurist relics, map out a choreography of care: a robotic arm presses buttons and combs hair, enacting rituals that, though minimal, pulse with emotional complexity. Surrounding this is a frosted-glass fence, a surrogate for the white-picket boundary between curated domestic calm and the chaos beyond.
But this mechanical nest is no utopia. It is a curated illusion, a theatre of security. Outside the glass, the structures mutate. Here, the home’s latent energies explode into hybrid forms, part machine, part animal, part anime dreamscape. This is not escape, but evolution. The wires don’t stop at the threshold; they tangle outward, suggesting that even as we seek refuge, we remain tethered to the systems that built us.
And so the home becomes both origin and departure point: a fragile motherboard where childhood memories flicker like data, and where intimacy itself is programmed into the circuitry. Çavuşoğlu invites us to imagine care not as a static shelter, but as a living, reactive system, one that knows when to protect, and when to let go.
PC Gamer by Nestor Siré at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (21/05/2025 – 25/05/2025)
From the interior of Istanbul’s domestic reverie, we move into the tactical exteriors of Cuba’s digital creativity. Nestor Siré’s PC Gamer, a chapter of the long-running CubaCreativa project, doesn’t merely exhibit works, it testifies to survival through invention. Here, art emerges not from abundance, but from the friction between scarcity and need.
In a country where technological access is fragmented and policed, Siré reveals the ingenuity of marginal communities who repurpose, adapt, and reimagine hardware in ways that resist capitalist logic. The gaming console is not a leisure object but a tool of resistance; the obsolete motherboard becomes a canvas for dreaming alternate futures.
Through community-driven methodologies, the exhibition unspools narratives of hacked routers, re-coded systems, and DIY aesthetics that invert the top-down authority of global tech culture. Every modded console, every patched-together server stands as proof that creativity is not the luxury of the connected elite, but a communal force born of friction.
As with Çavuşoğlu’s mechanical home, we find an ecosystem, a place where wires, people, and memories converge. But while evim yuva pines for the comforts of a secure past, PC Gamer crackles with the energy of the now: unstable, disruptive, yet radically democratic. It asserts that technology is never neutral; it is a weapon, a language, a home.
Siré’s vision is one of cultural hacking, where obsolescence becomes possibility, and marginality is a fertile ground for collective invention. The home here is not a fenced garden, but a distributed network, alive with the pulse of alternative connections.
Guo Cheng’s Bug at Magician Space, Beijing (01/05/2025 – 21/06/2025)
If Çavuşoğlu’s nest longs for the seamless and Siré’s modded world celebrates the flawed, Guo Cheng takes us deeper, into the glitch itself. Bug is not an error to fix but a sign of life, a pulse within the machine. Beginning with the historical “moth in the machine” of 1947, Cheng leads us into a layered meditation on entanglement: between technology and ecology, matter and meaning.
Split between two environments, a sterile data center and a surreal outdoor field, the exhibition opens a rift in perception. Rock cores wrapped in cables rotate under flickering green light, evoking ancient sediment and digital flow, while a smartphone endlessly scrolls through a calendar that far outlives human history. These are not sci-fi tropes but mirrors of our present: when even time is stored in apps and stones are mined to power thought.
Crossing into the second space, we meet the luminous tent, inspired by insects drawn to artificial light. Cheng echoes the movements of digital users and nocturnal bugs, driven by mysterious signals, drawn to light they cannot comprehend. The viewer becomes part of this swarm, a creature among quasi-objects that shimmer with technological decay and biological persistence.
Where evim yuva asked how to protect life, and PC Gamer how to build it from the scraps, Bug wonders what it means to exist within a system that consumes both. The data center is not separate from the forest, it feeds on it. We are not separate from the bugs, we are classified among them. Here, humanity is just another node in the network, susceptible to heat, disruption, and the flicker of dying signals.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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