Cover Art Concept: Editor’s Note

The Turkish-born artist Pınar Yoldaş’s provocative works question the boundaries between art and the biological sciences, between humans and nature, and between industrial objects and living organisms. This questioning contributes to feminist projects that have criticized the implicit masculinism of science and its associated gendered and sexual divisions and hierarchies (such as human versus nature and mind versus body). Yoldaş’s art thematically and aesthetically draws our attention to the violence of masculinist divisions, proposing instead a more fluid approach that emphasizes connections, flows, and mobilities.

This approach is vividly manifest in form and content in the installation featured on the cover of this issue. For Saltwater Heart, Yoldaş constructed the architecture of a heart’s circulatory system on an Istanbul sea bus the size of a whale. Through this installation the sea bus becomes a living organism; the sea bus/whale’s elaborately exposed heart reveals the constant circulation of life through a delicate network of tubes/veins and multiple pumps. One blockage in this circulatory network leads to the failure of the whole system. By turning the heart’s circulatory system inside out, Yoldaş’s work challenges the division between inside and outside and subverts the notion that bodies are contained, isolated entities. It also invokes the radical potential of mobility and movement for regulation and subversion, much like the four articles on gendered and sexual mobilities featured in this issue’s themed section.—Banu Gökarıksel