Meine
Umwelt
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.
Meine Umwelt is an artistic research photography project based on Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt: the idea that every living being exists not within a single objective world shared by all, but within its own world of meaningful signals, shaped by its sensory capacities, body, behaviour, and relations with its environment.
At the centre of the research is the Brown (White-neck) Bear in the natural environment of Azerbaijan. The project begins with an attempt not simply to observe the animal from the outside, but to approach the question: what constitutes a world that is meaningful to a bear? What functions as food, signal, danger, territory, route, boundary, or reason to return? And how does human presence — roads, vehicles, the sound of gunshots, military posts, aircraft, smells, structures, and the researchers themselves — become part of its Umwelt?
The research unfolds through field observation in Shahdag National Park, camera traps, route mapping, thermal imaging, sound, documentation of traces and damage to vegetation, archival material, as well as the local knowledge of park staff and residents of the surrounding area. Particular attention is given to places to which the animals repeatedly return: fruit trees, bodies of water, trails, and sites where scat, footprints, overturned stones, broken branches, and marks on tree bark have been found.
One of the central models of the project is Uexküll’s concept of the Funktionskreis — the functional circle connecting the perceptual world (Merkwelt) and the action world (Wirkwelt). The smell of fruit leads to the search for food; the trace of another bear may alter a route; a human sound may trigger withdrawal; seasonal abundance may become the reason for return or migration. Photography therefore records not so much the individual bear as the relationships through which elements of the environment acquire meaning for it.
From this emerges the project’s visual grammar: FOOD, SIGNAL, DANGER, ROUTE, TERRITORY, CONTACT, RETURN, ABSENCE. A tree ceases to be simply a tree and may become a food source, a landmark, a marking site, or a carrier of information about another animal. A road is infrastructure for a human, while for a bear it may become a boundary, a threat, or a route. A scratch on bark, scat, a broken branch, or a paw print is approached as a kind of “paw-writing” - a record of the animal’s presence and action within space.
At the centre of the research is the Brown (White-neck) Bear in the natural environment of Azerbaijan. The project begins with an attempt not simply to observe the animal from the outside, but to approach the question: what constitutes a world that is meaningful to a bear? What functions as food, signal, danger, territory, route, boundary, or reason to return? And how does human presence — roads, vehicles, the sound of gunshots, military posts, aircraft, smells, structures, and the researchers themselves — become part of its Umwelt?
The research unfolds through field observation in Shahdag National Park, camera traps, route mapping, thermal imaging, sound, documentation of traces and damage to vegetation, archival material, as well as the local knowledge of park staff and residents of the surrounding area. Particular attention is given to places to which the animals repeatedly return: fruit trees, bodies of water, trails, and sites where scat, footprints, overturned stones, broken branches, and marks on tree bark have been found.
One of the central models of the project is Uexküll’s concept of the Funktionskreis — the functional circle connecting the perceptual world (Merkwelt) and the action world (Wirkwelt). The smell of fruit leads to the search for food; the trace of another bear may alter a route; a human sound may trigger withdrawal; seasonal abundance may become the reason for return or migration. Photography therefore records not so much the individual bear as the relationships through which elements of the environment acquire meaning for it.
From this emerges the project’s visual grammar: FOOD, SIGNAL, DANGER, ROUTE, TERRITORY, CONTACT, RETURN, ABSENCE. A tree ceases to be simply a tree and may become a food source, a landmark, a marking site, or a carrier of information about another animal. A road is infrastructure for a human, while for a bear it may become a boundary, a threat, or a route. A scratch on bark, scat, a broken branch, or a paw print is approached as a kind of “paw-writing” - a record of the animal’s presence and action within space.
The camera trap occupies a particular position between two worlds. It records an event in the absence of a human observer, yet makes it accessible to humans only through its own technical conditions: movement, time, distance, angle, and light. The photographs are therefore treated not as direct representations of the bear’s Umwelt, but as traces of contact between the animal, its environment, a technological sensor, and human interpretation. Sequences of images, repeated appearances, and periods of absence become part of the work alongside the images themselves.
The project deliberately preserves the distinction between observation and inference. If a bear repeatedly returns to the same pear grove, we can record the repetition; the interpretation of why it returns emerges only through comparing traces, seasonal food sources, and local observations. If the animal stops appearing in the camera trap after human presence in the area, its absence becomes data, while the meaning of that absence remains a subject of investigation. In this way, Meine Umwelt simultaneously reconstructs a possible world of the bear and reveals the limits of the human ability to read that world conclusively.
This is where the artistic task of the project lies: not to claim that a human has succeeded in “seeing through the eyes of a bear,” but to create an experience of approaching another way of organising reality. Here, the bear is not an object of wildlife photography, but a subject of its own world and a node of relations between organism, territory, other species, technologies of observation, and humans.
The final installation is conceived in the aesthetic language of a contemporary biological field station. Its core consists of selected photographs presented as unique editions and printed on materials chosen according to the visual and conceptual nature of each image. These are accompanied by Google Maps, visual data from camera traps, timestamps, thermal images, traces, photographic samples of plants, “paw-writings,” and local testimonies. Together, they form both an illustration of the bear’s life and a space of investigation in which the viewer moves independently between fact, trace, hypothesis, and the impossibility of fully translating the bear’s Umwelt.
Meine Umwelt investigates precisely this chain, the moment when the presence of another living being becomes a trace, the trace becomes an image, the image becomes knowledge, and that knowledge once again calls into question the limits of human perception.
The project deliberately preserves the distinction between observation and inference. If a bear repeatedly returns to the same pear grove, we can record the repetition; the interpretation of why it returns emerges only through comparing traces, seasonal food sources, and local observations. If the animal stops appearing in the camera trap after human presence in the area, its absence becomes data, while the meaning of that absence remains a subject of investigation. In this way, Meine Umwelt simultaneously reconstructs a possible world of the bear and reveals the limits of the human ability to read that world conclusively.
This is where the artistic task of the project lies: not to claim that a human has succeeded in “seeing through the eyes of a bear,” but to create an experience of approaching another way of organising reality. Here, the bear is not an object of wildlife photography, but a subject of its own world and a node of relations between organism, territory, other species, technologies of observation, and humans.
The final installation is conceived in the aesthetic language of a contemporary biological field station. Its core consists of selected photographs presented as unique editions and printed on materials chosen according to the visual and conceptual nature of each image. These are accompanied by Google Maps, visual data from camera traps, timestamps, thermal images, traces, photographic samples of plants, “paw-writings,” and local testimonies. Together, they form both an illustration of the bear’s life and a space of investigation in which the viewer moves independently between fact, trace, hypothesis, and the impossibility of fully translating the bear’s Umwelt.
Meine Umwelt investigates precisely this chain, the moment when the presence of another living being becomes a trace, the trace becomes an image, the image becomes knowledge, and that knowledge once again calls into question the limits of human perception.
Exhibitions
Isolated Realities | Group Exhibition
Fluxus Space / Fly to Baku Art Weekend
30.10 – 15.11.2026
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
Fluxus Space / Fly to Baku Art Weekend
30.10 – 15.11.2026
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
