Sometimes a garden is not a place but an inner landscape where memory, loss, and hope coexist. In her new exhibition, Istanbul-based artist Denef Huvaj, a member of the Abkhaz–Adyghe diaspora, turns to this inner garden as a metaphor for life lived between countries and generations — an experience familiar to many families of the Circassian diaspora in the Middle East.

The Garden Within Me gathers the scattered elements of this memory. Denef’s photographs turn to places that hold deep personal meaning: a winter garden with a mulberry tree in the Adyghe village where she was born, once the site of weddings, funerals, and family gatherings; and a quiet seascape she looked at every day while caring for her aunt during her illness. These landscapes become fragments of spaces lost, transformed into an internal archive.

At the center of the exhibition is an installation with a suspended plant whose roots barely touch the soil. Visitors are invited to intervene: to give it water, to take part in this fragile process of seeking ground.

The people and animals in Huvaj’s works carry a profound vulnerability: children’s knees marked by bruises, an upturned gaze, a horse caught in the flash of the camera, a swan folded into dark water, the artist’s own searching look turned toward a winter garden. The exhibition reflects on a quiet state of acceptance: on the ability to carry one’s garden, and one’s roots, within, even when the ground beneath remains out of reach.

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