ANCIENT FUTURES · 2026
Woven Memory
Afghan carpets, installation · Art On Istanbul, Istanbul · 2026
Sometimes art arrives before we do.
Although I have never been to Afghanistan, I became part of a project carried out under USAID — the United States Agency for International Development — in the role of an artist. Through this process, my practice encountered Afghanistan’s centuries-old carpet-weaving tradition.
My artistic practice has long been shaped by technology, algorithms, and the possible languages of the future. Yet I believe that truly thinking about the future also requires us to understand the past with equal depth.
I bring an as-yet-unlived future to the same table as thousands of years of cultural memory. I am building a practice with one foot in futures that have not yet been formed, and the other in craft traditions shaped over millennia.
This is why my work has extended from Nemrut to Troy, from Korea to the United States and Europe. The geographies have changed, but the central concern of my art has remained the same: how people give meaning to the world, and how that meaning continues to exist beyond its own time.
For nearly two thousand years, the carpet has carried abstract thought, symbols, and stories. It is one of humanity’s most powerful narrative languages. For me, the aim was not to reproduce this tradition, but to enter into dialogue with it and generate new meanings through that encounter.
Because neither technology nor tradition stands alone at the centre of my art. Meaning does.
Within my practice, algorithms and weaving, digital production and handcraft become different expressions of the same thought: How do human beings make sense of the world? And how can meaning be produced again across different times, different geographies, and among people who have never met one another?
I believe this is precisely where the greatest power of art begins: not in repeating the past, but in allowing it to speak with the future.
When I look back from a possible point in the future, the present and a world from thousands of years ago appear almost equally distant. Perhaps this is what timelessness truly is.
- Medium
- Hand-woven Afghan carpets, installation
- Exhibition
- Art On Istanbul, 22.07–01.08.2026
- Supported by
- USAID
