This series of photographs show people from Adana looking at objects which have been placed on a plinth.

 

Since leaving St Martins, I have thought a lot about the role of contemporary art in different societies and cultures. These concerns come to the foreground when I go back to my hometown in Turkey. I find it difficult to tell my family about what I do in London. The contemporary issues I explore seem less relevant to their lives and its difficult for them to relate to the work I produce.

 

I wanted to explore the idea of contemporary sculpture and my family. The relationship between the object and a person creates a symbolic status and a social structure which links to my background. People left their habitual identities and ordinary circumstances to achieve an anonymous simplicity by participating in a studio setting. This meeting describes an intriguing relationship between the power of an object and the objectification of the figure.

Extraneous Objects

I  work across many mediums; photography, video, performance and installation are all a part of my practice. I often revisit themes and rituals from my ancestral home in my works - manipulated images of my family members, ceremonial flower arrangements and radically embroidered quilts offer hints into my upbringing in Turkey’s south. During the lockdown, I have started making freehand machine embroidery and tried to capture a vision for a post-pandemic future, along with a journey through my creative influences and history. 

 

When l start making each work with this medium, however, l make plans and lay out all the yarn with colour coordination, but in the end, improvisation leads me. The randomness of mistakes make sense when you look at the work from a few feet away. The process becomes quite satisfying after adding hundred of meters of thread and suddenly, an impression appears. 


 

First I prepare a digital collage and turn that into a physical work by using sewing machine embroidery. It takes a long time and involves a lot of improvisation as well as mistakes that lead me to take new directions. 


I particularly enjoyed sewing the section depicting a sack of thread or a pile of textiles. While the thread is the fabric of the piece, it also becomes the object. I also noticed how time is captured when making these images. The needle with the thread; green, red, yellow, blue, shapes a memory. Two weeks elapse and these works remain. 

Street Sellers

I work across many mediums; photography, video, performance and installation are all a part of my practice. I often revisit themes and rituals from my ancestral home in my works - manipulated images of my family members, ceremonial flower arrangements and radically embroidered quilts offer hints into my upbringing in Turkey’s south. During the lockdown, I have started making freehand machine embroidery and tried to capture a vision for a post-pandemic future, along with a journey through my creative influences and history. 

 

When l start making each work with this medium, however, l make plans and lay out all the yarn with colour coordination, but in the end, improvisation leads me. The randomness of mistakes make sense when you look at the work from a few feet away. The process becomes quite satisfying after adding hundred of meters of thread and suddenly, an impression appears. 

 

First I prepare a digital collage and turn that into a physical work by using sewing machine embroidery. It takes a long time and involves a lot of improvisation as well as mistakes that lead me to take new directions. 


I particularly enjoyed sewing the section depicting a sack of thread or a pile of textiles. While the thread is the fabric of the piece, it also becomes the object. I also noticed how time is captured when making these images. The needle with the thread; green, red, yellow, blue, shapes a memory. Two weeks elapse and these works remain. 

​

Days into Nights

Our personal experiences only allow us to understand a fraction of what the larger world is. In a digital age we share a world of constantly changing images which give us the ability to develop a sophisticated understanding of visual language. My intention is to share my experiences of daily life in Adana, observing the traditions and rituals of coexistence. The traditional material captures memories and craftsmanship.

 

In this work I have brought two contrasting elements together: feminine materials and masculine images. This leads us to question the word ‘yorgan’.

 

A yorgan is a hand-quilted duvet which is often passed down through generations as an heirloom. In families, a yorgan is often imbued with memories and associations.  Children remember grandmothers’ yorgan, and pass them down to their own grandchildren. In Adana, neighbours share everything, including yorgan when guests appear in the winter. A request to borrow a yorgan from a neighbour would not seem strange.

 

In my pieces, I have subverted the yorgan, which is usually associated with providing comfort, protection and security. The quilted images refer to ‘security’, but of a very different kind. Images of war on a quilted yorgan encourage us to consider the price families’ pay in times of conflict; objects that normally comfort and protect us are decorated with images of mechanical warfare that can kill on mass.

 

Who or what do we trust? Where do we hide from our fears? Can we retain our real identity by ‘hiding under the covers’? The beauty of a traditional flower design is transformed into heavy artillery. Can we ever challenge the social order and its structures of power, authority and control?

 

What is the relationship between the home and its daily objects? Is home a place to escape the state? Is the duvet an object of safety or oppression?

The War Heirloom

The territory that we inhabit today and in which we develop our daily activities is constructed by our history. The progressive appreciation of social media and its effect on art, politics, social life, leisure, education, and religion has, in recent years, impacted the role of design in this territory.


The construction of  ‘heritage’ questions the meaning of social and cultural transformations brought about by emigration. The endless number of objects that have entered Portugal over the last 50 years have lived inside homes and created strong links between house, family, society, and culture. Those objects, brought by immigrants from its former colonies, have become the conveyers of new cultural models and have shaped new multiculturalism with associated lifestyles and symbolic values attached to them. The immigrants’ houses were, perhaps, the first objects representing this new social and cultural framework, as they became visible on the Portuguese rural landscape. The path of cultural objects into mass-consumption has recently been incorporated into Portuguese anthropology. Fernando Galhano is one of the first anthropologists to do some research on these changes in this ethnographic field.

 

Objects traveled, changed hand and were adapted to new stories and climates. They crossed countless borders, shifted identity, and became new at each stage of the journey. They have endlessly been created, produced, sold, bought, used and re-appropriated.

 

For this serious of fabric collages, I have been looking at flags from different countries and objects from Portuguese folk culture to describe a nation as a whole. To discover a new place, story or idea implies a change of expectation and point of view. I try to achieve a serious of compositions that challenge context while combining colours, patterns, and shapes with images from nature, drawings of traditional objects from both rural and urban areas of Portugal with objects that are connected to colonial relationships that underpin people’s cultural history.

 

People are currently thinking much about their political identity and sovereignty. My flags contradict the nationalism associated with flags by incorporating images which celebrate the multiculturalism brought by immigration.

The Landscape of Perpetual Flags

I work across many mediums; photography, video, performance and installation are all a part of my practice. I often revisit themes and rituals from my ancestral home in my works - manipulated images of my family members, ceremonial flower arrangements and radically embroidered quilts offer hints into my upbringing in Turkey’s south. During the lockdown, I have started making freehand machine embroidery and tried to capture a vision for a post-pandemic future, along with a journey through my creative influences and history. 

 

When l start making each work with this medium, however, l make plans and lay out all the yarn with colour coordination, but in the end, improvisation leads me. The randomness of mistakes make sense when you look at the work from a few feet away. The process becomes quite satisfying after adding hundred of meters of thread and suddenly, an impression appears. 

 

First I prepare a digital collage and turn that into a physical work by using sewing machine embroidery. It takes a long time and involves a lot of improvisation as well as mistakes that lead me to take new directions. 


I particularly enjoyed sewing the section depicting a sack of thread or a pile of textiles. While the thread is the fabric of the piece, it also becomes the object. I also noticed how time is captured when making these images. The needle with the thread; green, red, yellow, blue, shapes a memory. Two weeks elapse and these works remain. 

Vase of Flowers

I work across many mediums; photography, video, performance and installation are all a part of my practice. I often revisit themes and rituals from my ancestral home in my works - manipulated images of my family members, ceremonial flower arrangements and radically embroidered quilts offer hints into my upbringing in Turkey’s south. During the lockdown, I have started making freehand machine embroidery and tried to capture a vision for a post-pandemic future, along with a journey through my creative influences and history. 

 

When l start making each work with this medium, however, l make plans and lay out all the yarn with colour coordination, but in the end, improvisation leads me. The randomness of mistakes make sense when you look at the work from a few feet away. The process becomes quite satisfying after adding hundred of meters of thread and suddenly, an impression appears. 

 

First I prepare a digital collage and turn that into a physical work by using sewing machine embroidery. It takes a long time and involves a lot of improvisation as well as mistakes that lead me to take new directions. 


I particularly enjoyed sewing the section depicting a sack of thread or a pile of textiles. While the thread is the fabric of the piece, it also becomes the object. I also noticed how time is captured when making these images. The needle with the thread; green, red, yellow, blue, shapes a memory. Two weeks elapse and these works remain. 

 

The Pumpkin Store

I work across many mediums; photography, video, performance and installation are all a part of my practice. I often revisit themes and rituals from my ancestral home in my works - manipulated images of my family members, ceremonial flower arrangements and radically embroidered quilts offer hints into my upbringing in Turkey’s south. During the lockdown, I have started making freehand machine embroidery and tried to capture a vision for a post-pandemic future, along with a journey through my creative influences and history. 

 

When l start making each work with this medium, however, l make plans and lay out all the yarn with colour coordination, but in the end, improvisation leads me. The randomness of mistakes make sense when you look at the work from a few feet away. The process becomes quite satisfying after adding hundred of meters of thread and suddenly, an impression appears. 

 

First I prepare a digital collage and turn that into a physical work by using sewing machine embroidery. It takes a long time and involves a lot of improvisation as well as mistakes that lead me to take new directions. 


I particularly enjoyed sewing the section depicting a sack of thread or a pile of textiles. While the thread is the fabric of the piece, it also becomes the object. I also noticed how time is captured when making these images. The needle with the thread; green, red, yellow, blue, shapes a memory. Two weeks elapse and these works remain. 



Pete's in his twenties 

Flea Market in Adana

Wreaths are usually given for a celebration in Turkey: weddings, openings, and ceremonies. They have a long, wooden structure with a stand, and a round shape at the top to hold fresh flowers. For me, growing up, they were a symbol of power and wealth; the importance of someone who is able to afford something that, in a few days, will be spoiled. I often asked myself, “Why would anyone throw their money away for something that will die?”

 

The work emerges from personal relationships with my own culture and identity, which affirms the idea of ‘home’, created by community of language, traditions, certain beliefs and politics. The photographs combine beauty with sadness and texts which seem contrary to function. They create curiosity through their ownership. Where were the flower baskets before? Where does the text come from? Where is the landscape where the wreaths are now?


In Turkey, a country where people are increasingly fearful of expressing their opinions, interpretations of history and identity have become supressed. Imbued with meaning, people are not allowed to put their ‘flower arrangements’ anywhere they want. Flowers die, everything fades eventually, even regimes. I placed the works in rural areas of my hometown, Adana, a place unlocateable to many, yet very recognizable to me. The wilting flowers create metaphors relating to immigration, global warming, technology and social media. They also represent the tragic beauty of the location.

 

The idea is not an attempt to show what is beautiful but rather to show what is left. What happens when the beauty is gone? They remind us that things are temporary. Through my works I try to put things together that are juxtaposed: the meaning of the text and also the casual language is far removed from the traditional object they are displayed with. While the world we live is already very well articulated I am interested in unnamed possibilities. In this sense, dead and abandoned flowers come alive as a readymade when they are removed from their context.

Below is the text I used for this work:


Are you still talking?

-Because l am done.


Me and me and me and me...

-we think so much of it.


My language is insulting me:

-is that it?


My country...

-what is next?


How could l talk about my religion?

-DONT!

You have to fight beauty

 (l’m just saying)


It was suddenly theirs:

- what is the point?


What do you do when a place is not your home anymore?

- You cope (point)


What would you do if you were there?

“Who cares?”


Yellow things are coming:

-l am sick of this-

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Mustafa Boga