Kök begins with the question of how much of the geography we inhabit we carry within ourselves. Carpet and textile motifs passed down through generations within Anatolia’s visual memory are approached not simply as ornaments belonging to the past, but as living traces that carry identity, belonging, and cultural memory.

The figures, rendered in black-and-white embroidery, quietly inhabit a field of colorful carpet motifs, while the patterns spill beyond their ground and seep into their faces. The boundary between figure and motif gradually dissolves, revealing the traces we carry from the places we inhabit, the cultures we are born into, and those who came before us. The carpet border acts both as a shared ground surrounding the figures and as a boundary between inside and outside. As the patterns extend onto the figures’ faces, they make visible the tension between the weight of tradition and the individual’s struggle to find a voice of their own. In this sense, Kök speaks not only of where we belong, but also of a cultural inheritance that nourishes and shapes us, and whose boundaries we sometimes seek to move beyond.

The work takes as its point of departure the distinctly Anatolian familiarity found in the characters of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s cinema. Their silences, moments of waiting, and a sense of familiarity that extends beyond their individual stories are brought into dialogue with a visual memory transmitted across generations through weaving and embroidery. Here, embroidery becomes not a means of reproducing the past, but a way of forging a new relationship between past and present. Each stitch leaves a new trace on a surface where personal narrative and collective memory meet.