From 14 to 28 November, ArtSharing lab&gallery in Rome hosts We Invent Creatures to Explain Ourselves, a group exhibition that brings together artists with different practices and languages around a single question: what can a creature say that human beings cannot say directly?
Ceramics, illustration, painting, sculpture, photography and film: each artist invents their own creature and entrusts it with a fear, a fragility, a transformation. The result is a path in which the visitor, standing before each figure, finds themselves facing a mirror.
The exhibition is produced by Paper People Project and Creative Circle, a multidisciplinary dialogue platform based in Milan and Istanbul. Together, they carry the project forward as an independent, non-profit initiative to connect new artistic voices with the international scene.
Curatorial text
Where words are enough, we speak; where they are not, we invent creatures, and we make new things, new forms, new symbols. Every time we reached the limit of language, we reached for another one: line, color, form, sound. In it we told our joy and our grief, our fear and our love, the events we lived through. What is spoken flies away; what is made remains. And so every line, every sculpture, every image became a small trace left for the future, a note fallen into history. We drew an animal on the cave wall because we wanted to give our fear a face. We carved the statue of a god because there was no other way to make the limits of our power and our helplessness visible. To explain ourselves, in every age, we have given life to a new creature. Today we do the same thing, only the material has changed.
We Invent Creatures to Explain Ourselves gathers the present-day form of this ancient impulse. Nine artists invent nine different creatures: one carries, as a grotesque form, the darkness within the human being; one carries, as a fragile figure, social masks; one carries, as an organic ceramic body, transformation; one carries, in the cold atmosphere of photography, loneliness. The materials differ (ceramic, photography, figure, abstraction, natural material) but all are born from the same instinct: to entrust what we cannot say directly to the body of a creature.
This exhibition is not a bestiary. It is a confessional notebook, only its language has changed. Standing before each creature, the visitor is in fact looking into a mirror; the question asked is always the same: What, exactly, has the human being become today?
Artists and works
Hazal Şerifoğlu · Ceramic artist FAVİSSA, 2026 Favissa makes visible that uneven «breaking point,» where pain comes to a halt to make room for rebellion. The break is not an end, but the moment when the true monster inside us takes a step outward. Hello, new me! Now you can no longer break me!
Emren Zeytinoğlu · Artist, Illustrator MARGHERİTE (Daisies), 2026 In Irish folklore, daisies are associated with the spirits of children who died at a young age. Here they become vestiges of a lost childhood, carried into adulthood and offered as gestures of intimacy. The work explores vulnerability both as a means of connection and as a source of distance, investigating the tension between the desire for closeness and the fear it arouses.
Daniela Budişteanu · Artist REM, 2020 This work develops around the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phase of sleep. The artist represents the ambiguous condition between dream and reality through figurative and amorphous elements, placed in an abstract space without spatial coordinates. The work lacks a defined spatial structure and a recognizable perspective, thus expressing the condition of suspension between dream and reality. The visual composition does not merely depict a scene of sleep, but explores and conveys to the viewer, through painterly practice, the fragility of personal values, individual anxieties and the relationship between body and mind.
Dilara Yerlikaya · Sculptor GORGONE (Gorgon), 2026 She would like to be seen, but makes herself invisible. She would like to open up, but thickens her own shell. She would like to come closer, but keeps her distance. She would like to trust, but doubts. She seeks contact, but insists on remaining untouchable. She would like to be loved, but fears being hurt. Is our defense directed only outward? Or does the human being point their spines above all against themselves?
Ramon Karolan · Photographer, Lyric Artist DAS WESEN İN MİR, THE BEING WITHIN ME, 2026 Sometimes words are not enough to tell what we hide inside us. This is why we invent creatures to which we entrust our fears, our shames and our fragilities. Through these photographs, the creature becomes the mirror of a part of us that we try to protect ourselves from, but which slowly ends up belonging to us. The final mirror invites the viewer to confront themselves and what they hide. If we could truly show ourselves for who we are, would we still need a creature?
Yıldırım Yazganarıkan · Artist, Architect SFERA (Sphere), 2026 Most things, seen from afar, appear as a single, simple object. As you come closer, you realize it holds countless characters. They repel each other, attract each other, embrace, struggle and find an understanding. The human being too, from the outside, appears as one person. Within, however, they keep multiple voices, souls and forces that guide them.
Taha Düzler · Ceramic artist NO.1, 2026 Throughout history, human beings have imagined different beings to tell of their fears, their curiosity and what they could not understand. Drawing on protective spirits, beliefs and rituals from different cultures, this work focuses on the relationship between people and the beings they create to express themselves. Familiar and at the same time strange, these beings are placed where the traces of the past meet imagination. In the beings he creates, man in fact leaves fragments of his own emotions and of the world he lives in.
İzel Yücel · Film director LOOK AT IT. FEEL IT. LOOK AGAIN., 2026 A woman. A body. A thing. Look closer. Something moves beneath her skin. Something that shouldn’t be there. Or perhaps something that has always been there. The flesh stretches. Blood seeps out. The bandages cannot hold anything together. Is it a parasite? A desire? A punishment? Does it belong to her? Did you put it there? It disgusts you. You want to see more. The skin moves again. You wait for it to tear. Look at it. Desire it. Hate it. Look again. The more you look, the more it grows. And when it finally returns your gaze, who is the monster?
Ece E. Sözkesen · Artist, Creative Director BURATTİNİ (Puppets), 2026 Avoid becoming a puppet. Do not admire the hands pulling the strings; be master of your own movements. For whole nights, nourish hope by dreaming of becoming a puppet-man. And yet the puppet’s stuffing has already crumbled away and its stitches have come undone. All that remains is a journey carried forward with pride: something that goes beyond renouncing one’s own existence, perhaps the last struggle against one’s own identity.
