Istanbul

The Black Pen Project

The Black Pen Project represents the most recent phase of an ongoing engagement with the fragments attributed to the fourteenth-century artist and storyteller Siyah Kalem. Developed through years of living and working in Istanbul, the paintings bring together ideas first explored in Şeytan Tüyü and later expanded through the installation Nomadic Tales. Returning to painting allowed these concerns to be revisited on a more intimate scale.

Throughout the project, figures drawn from Siyah Kalem's surviving images are treated as vessels rather than illustrations. Projected onto canvas and carefully defined, they become containers for contemporary experience. Graffiti, political stencils, architectural details, fragments of text and traces gathered from everyday encounters in Istanbul accumulate within their forms, allowing the city itself to inhabit historical images.

Working between past and present, the paintings explore how images, stories and cultural memories survive through transformation. The figures remain recognisable, yet their identities are continually reshaped by the surfaces they contain. Historical fragments become frameworks through which personal experience, observation and memory can be explored.

Returning from the scale of installation to the intimacy of painting allowed these concerns to be distilled and refined. The works focus on the relationship between containment and accumulation, structure and improvisation, control and transformation. In doing so, they reflect a recurring concern throughout my practice: how people leave traces behind and how meaning emerges through the layered surfaces of the world.