Planet I

Benküre / Planet I was ha:ar’s first solo exhibition in Istanbul, presented at Zülfaris Karaköy in 2022. The exhibition continued the trajectory developed through ha:ar’s earlier presentations in Venice and Milan, bringing together sculpture, AI, moving image, sound, light and digital production within an immersive environment.

Taking place in the former Zülfaris Synagogue, the exhibition used the architecture as part of its conceptual structure. ha:ar transformed the space into a contemporary temple of self-development, self-projection and self-admiration, reflecting on how individuals construct, worship and become trapped inside their own images. Combining the ideas of “Planet” and “I”, Benküre / Planet I explored the self as a constructed and unstable territory shaped by belief, image, desire, technology and digital projection.

Works from the Impossible Sculptures series were shown alongside MindFlow, an eleven-channel video and sound installation; Refraction, a stained-glass series generated through AI; and Disruption, a pioneering AI-assisted robotic sculpture performance first presented at Contemporary Istanbul. For Disruption, ha:ar created a dataset from classical sculpture archives and its own Impossible Sculptures imagery, trained a GAN model, and used the resulting forms as the basis for a marble sculpture produced through an industrial robotic performance in front of an audience.

By bringing marble, glass and metal together with screens, software, sound, light, AI and robotics, the exhibition positioned technology as part of a broader artistic language concerned with the conflict between human beings, civilisation and the systems that reshape them. During its one-week run, Benküre / Planet I reached over 7,000 visitors, becoming one of the most visited exhibitions of that year.