Sefa Çatuk — Les Jardins suspendus de Babylone — AZA Art — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in 5 days: February 5 → 28, 2026

AZA Art presents the solo exhibition of Sefa Çatuk, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, in Paris, curated by Ayça Okay and Sinda Drine.

Represented by AWC Contemporary, Sefa Çatuk creates personal mythologies through a symbolic and metaphorical language. By bringing together universal religious and social narratives with contemporary political realities, he constructs a visual universe that is both ironic and layered. His work focuses on customs, traditions, belief systems, language, and rituals in public space, while reinterpreting iconic paintings from the history of art within a present day context.

With The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, these narratives intertwine with one of humanity’s most enduring utopias. Inspired by the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal rhythms of nature, the exhibition imagines an intermediate space where myth, history, and the present are interwoven. A garden that is both real and imaginary, personal and collective, ancient and resolutely contemporary.

“Babylon was not only a city, but an idea, that of a world rebuilt against nature, out of love, out of power, out of nostalgia.” Jean Bottéro, Babylon (1994)

Sefa Çatuk, The Flock, 2025 — 150 x 150 cm — Huile sur toile Courtesy of the artist & AZA Art, Paris

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

In The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Sefa Çatuk constructs landscapes that belong neither to reality nor to fiction, but to an intermediate space where deep structures converge. The landscape becomes a social fact, a space shaped by beliefs, rituals, norms, and narratives passed down from generation to generation.

The painted scenes are organized through horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines that are not merely formal choices but part of a symbolic narrative. They recall that every society is inscribed within a spatial organization that establishes hierarchies, separates, and brings together. Human, animal, and plant figures coexist in fragile balances, revealing the constant tension between the individual and the collective frameworks that shape them.

The reference to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a myth whose existence remains uncertain, acts as a sociological metaphor. It evokes the way societies are built upon shared narratives that are sometimes unverifiable yet deeply structuring. In Sefa Çatuk’s work, myth is not a relic of the past. It is an active tool of cohesion, control, and projection, embedded in social memory as much as in the individual imagination.

The figures appear to inhabit a suspended time, outside any precise chronology. This suspension questions our contemporary relationship to social time, a fragmented time that oscillates between historical inheritance and political present. By revisiting foundational images from the history of art, the artist highlights the persistence of social codes and their ability to transform without ever disappearing.

Painting thus becomes a space of mediation. It does not merely represent the world but reveals its invisible structures. The viewer is invited to recognize, within these silent landscapes, the mechanisms that organize their own social experience. Between dream and reality, the works open up a space of inquiry where the intimate meets the collective, and where the image functions as a critical language.

Sinda Drine

Curators : Ayça Okay & Sinda Drine — Productor : Maeva Polat