Isolated Realities
Every living presence is in constant exchange with its surroundings, reshaping the environment that sustains it. To trace this presence is to see how life extends beyond the body, continually mapping itself onto the world.
The organism and its surroundings rewrite one another through adaptation and movement. Every movement leaves a physical trace, sometimes as a quiet residue, and at other times becoming a lasting ecological pattern.
The exhibition follows this shared formation across conflicting scales, bringing space, repetition, and biological traces into a single dialogue. It explores how hyper-local changes reach directly into global structures. Inside living matter, the outside world remains permanently present. Climate and ambient conditions become embedded in the developing body, turning matter and territory into active archives of shifts that immediate perception can miss.
One physical room can hold multiple, overlapping versions of reality, depending on the body that processes its signals, whether animal, plant, or microorganism. The works move through these archives, shifting between empirical science and poetic contemplation. Where measurement isolates a mechanism to understand its form, the visual image and physical fragment preserve a relationship, allowing it to remain open, fluid, and unresolved.
At the center of this inquiry is the field of tension where organism and environment continuously shape one another. By isolating this fluid state, the objects become spaces where boundaries emerge, blur, and reform. They reveal the environment as life rendering its own history visible.
Curator Huseyn Jalil
Art Manager Agnessa Tariverdiyeva
Artists Elnara Nasirli, Timur Zaripov, Emin Mathers, Nazrin Mammadova, Huseyn Jalil
Field specialist Parviz Fatullayev, collaborator with WWF Azerbaijan
In collaboration with WWF Azerbaijan; Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of the Republic of Azerbaijan
As part of Fly to Baku. Art Weekend. Sense the Future NOW held under the leadership of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and IDEA Public Union.
01 · THE PROJECT
Isolated Realities is a group exhibition and research project produced by Fluxus Space. The initiative brings contemporary artists into the field alongside ecologists, treating environmental monitoring as a starting point for artistic inquiry.
The project traces the complex biotopes of five emblematic species of the Caucasus: the goitered gazelle, Caucasian leopard, brown bear, grey wolf, and Eastern imperial eagle. The research approaches territory, climate, and natural cycles as an active archive where living organisms and their surroundings constantly rewrite one another.
At its centre, the project asks: where does an organism end and its environment begin? Shifting sensory capacities and behavioural patterns shape distinct realities within the same shared space. The exhibition carries this research into the gallery through photography, cinematic video, sound design, and immersive installations.
02 · FIELDWORK / LOCATIONS
Fieldwork was conducted across three distinct natural environments, each serving as an ecological laboratory for observing how life shapes the landscape.
Shirvan National Park 39.67165° N, 49.19484° E
Shirvan National Park is defined by open saline steppes and flat coastal plains where the ecosystem dictates a life of constant movement, vast visibility, and reliance on seasonal water basins.
Zangezur National Park 38.90770° N, 46.08346° E
Zangezur National Park presents a severe mountain terrain shaped by ancient volcanic formations, offering deep rocky canyons, steep cliffs, and isolated stone ledges that function as natural shelters.
Shahdag National Park 41.00778° N, 48.04200° E
Shahdag National Park encompasses a multilayered mountain system of dense broadleaf forests and deep wooded ravines that provide rich foraging paths and seasonal cover.
03 · FIELDWORK / PRACTICE
In the field, artists and scientists worked together to study the habitats of the target species. To extend the boundaries of human perception, the team combined conventional field observation with specialised methods, including bioacoustics, ultraviolet and thermal imaging, and high-precision 3D laser scanning of the terrain.
Each artist used these instruments to develop an individual methodology, mapping territorial traces, acoustic fields, and physical shifts in the landscape. The fieldwork documented how these living systems adapt to and leave lasting marks on their surroundings.
Following the expeditions, the collected material became the basis for artistic production. Moving between empirical science and contemporary art, the project transforms field data into a precise spatial language of images, sound design, and physical fragments, leaving the ecological relationships revealed through the research fluid, unresolved, and active.
04–05 · ARTISTIC RESPONSES
Elnara Nasirli
AQUILA, 2026
Multimedia Installation and Performance
Wood, human hair, silk, mixed media, soundscape, video footage
Aquila is a monumental eagle’s nest constructed from the branches of a dying mulberry tree in the artist’s garden, interwoven with long black braids. Rooted in Azerbaijan’s cultural and ecological heritage, the work transforms the remains of a tree into an architecture of survival, connecting personal memory with the vulnerability of entire ecosystems.
During the performance, the artist inhabits the nest, continuously weaving a black braid that extends beyond its boundaries. This repetitive gesture brings together human traditions of braiding and the instinctive architecture of birds, exploring inherited knowledge, belonging and ecological interdependence.
Confronting the irreversible loss of biodiversity, Aquila becomes both a monument to the fragility of life and a reflection on humanity’s responsibility toward the natural world.
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Timur Zaripov
i told the bugs what you did to me, good luck next time you’re in the forest, 2026
Multimedia Installation
i told the bugs what you did. the story is mine now, passing into the lives you didn’t notice, and the forest you’ve never been in. being known so completely could feel like forgiveness. i hope you can sleep. i could trace every connection in your brain and still be waiting for someone else to answer. so i leave you in the night. if i wake in the clouds, i may remember your hands from the inside. by then i might realize i was the one who made you. a little light comes through the trees. you can lie down here on the grass. you can almost believe you’re safe.
the fly
The work looks at distinct forest biotopes across Azerbaijan through the sensory apparatus of a fruit fly. Within the video installation, dense vegetation dissolves into monochrome point clouds. Filtered through sixteen hundred optical facets, the landscape becomes a coarse, flickering field of light and shadow, where forms hold their shape only when the gaze moves closer.
Movement through each biotope is driven by an autonomous digital network modeled on a real fruit fly’s brain, mapped neuron by neuron. In this fluid space, the boundaries between the engineered and the living are left entirely unresolved.
The work approaches the forest as a territory enacted by its inhabitant. It explores how a specific sensory system builds its own absolute reality, and what always remains hidden just beyond the limits of human perception.
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Emin Mathers
MEINE UMWELT, 2026
Artistic Research Photography Installation
Meine Umwelt is an artistic research project inspired by Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt, exploring how the Caucasian brown (white-neck) bear perceives, navigates, and gives meaning to its environment. Using camera traps, field observation, traces, map, and collected ecological visual data, the project attempts to reconstruct fragments of the bear’s world while questioning the limits of human interpretation. The final UV lightened installation takes the form of a contemporary biological field station, where photographs and research materials become a speculative interface between human perception and the bear’s Umwelt.
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Nazrin Mammadova
INDETERMINATE PRESENCE, 2026
Audiovisual Sound Performance
Where does an organism end and its environment begin?
Indeterminate Presence is an audiovisual exploration of the shifting boundaries between living organisms, their environments, and human perception.
Developed through field research in the Zangezur National Park in Nakhchivan, the work brings together environmental recordings, spatial scans, and experimental sound constructions. Through fragmentation, layering, and sonic transformation, collected material is detached from its original context and reorganized into an abstract sensory landscape.
Drawing on acoustic ecology, experimental music, soundscape studies, and the concept of aural diversity, the work investigates the multiplicity of individual listening experiences and the subjective nature of acoustic perception.
At the core of this artistic practice are three interconnected ideas: sound as material, listening as a way of knowing, and landscape as a subjective construction.
Moving between documentation and abstraction, the performance approaches sound not merely as composition, but as a physical phenomenon, a spatial experience, and a means of investigating our relationship with the environment.
Rather than reproducing a natural landscape, Indeterminate Presence constructs an alternative perceptual space in which the distinctions between organism, environment, and observer become increasingly unstable.
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Huseyn Jalil
KINDA CONFLICT, 2026
Installation
Two industrial robotic manipulators, real-time custom software
Dimensions variable
Kinda Conflict stages a closed-loop robotic system modeled on the ritualized interactions of goitered gazelles. Two industrial manipulators, integrated with horns, engage each other in a continuous choreography of calibrated coordination. In the wild, these natural interactions function as non-verbal exchanges through which animals assess physical strength, reading subtle shifts in alignment, movement, and spatial boundaries.
The installation converts this behavioral tension into a real-time feedback loop. As one manipulator generates a movement trajectory, the other instantly reads its parameters and computes a counter-response. Connected through a data stream, each system continuously modifies the shared physical parameters, making every machine action the immediate condition for the next.
Through an absolute parity of force, a definitive outcome becomes impossible. This interaction operates as a form of mutual regulation, where kinetic tension itself sustains the system’s logic. The two entities remain locked in an ongoing dialogue within a shared territory, a space where both sides constantly adjust to one another, holding the integrity of the entire system.