Ahmet Güneştekin: The Lost Alphabet

The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) presents The Lost Alphabet by Ahmet Güneştekin. Weaving the artist’s works across diverse mediums, the exhibition focuses on affective associations of sculptural materials combined with objects in narrative constellations that bridge ancient mythologies with the changing environment of contemporary life. Curated by Christoph Tannert, the exhibition features sculptures, installations, videos, sound works, ceramics, and fabrics blending macro and micro scales through meticulous material interventions.

Given rise to fluid mythological worlds, the artist’s practice encompasses installations whose bodily presence transforms a visual perception – a face-to-face experience – into a fully haptic, subjective encounter; filmic and sound practices in which he develops micro-rhythmic structures that challenge the field of the historical narrative; dimensional works that expand his interpretations into meta-myths with multi-faceted figures seamlessly inhabiting canvas, textiles and ceramics; hybrid works mostly affected by migration objects, their volume in space, and the memories they evoke; and sculptures made of stone and metal fragments combined syncretically, coalescing the movement and immobility in a dialectical pairing of creation and destruction. 

The Lost Alphabet aims to open up a dialogue with materiality that evolves into a polyphonic conversation. It confronts the viewer with time-space pieces broken off from the whole and seeks answers: Why does an object become the subject of inquiry? Why do some objects return as the focus of research again and again? The artist explores everyday fragments mostly shaped by mundane yet evocative objects, light and shadow, humans and objects cast on each other, their volume in space, memories and stories they trigger, imbued with an aesthetic inspired by ruins and present-tense relics. In the artist’s world, all objects circularly emerge in ruins; shoes, signposts, suitcases, gas masks, scarves, fridges, bicycles and all other non-human actors are the material remnants of the past. 

The realm of language is the artist’s sphere of practice in the works as a tribute to the banned fictional, imaginary universes and thoughts, extinct languages due to human intervention, and vulnerable and endangered languages. He superimposes graphemes (letters) onto phonemes (sounds) in the works with the letterforms. Relying on the notion that language is a complex living system, he investigates the complex issue of alphabet politics — the attempts by nations, cultures, and ideologies to ascribe a specific set of letters to a given language. The artist suggests that the alphabets are not just forms of language, they encompass cultures and voices they blossomed from.  

Güneştekin’s sensibilities about lost alphabets coalesce with his treatment of diverse materials. The artist’s explorations of stone blossom into a series of works, which incorporate sound, images, and objects in a fusion that reflects different facets of the materials specific to the exhibition’s sculptural space. Studying the ancient coins of Anatolia from the last three thousand years, in the section titled Witnesses Through Thousands of Years, co-curated by Hasan Mert Kaya, through metafictional constructs and affective associations, he deconstructs different dimensions of mythology to disclose the multi-layered aspect of everyday life and the multiple truths to which it gives birth.

From his sculptures with stone formations, some with fossilised structures, to his installations with objects, his site-specific works create a dialogue with a particular setting. They are interwoven in a way that intensifies viewers’ perceptions. The sculptures featuring marble stone formations enclosed within intertwining circular metal carcasses with differing sizes and layouts and carved through labyrinthine pathways showcase the artist’s scale change and connect the installation space to Feshane’s industrial history.

The Lost Alphabet is a cultural project introduced to the Istanbul art scene in the city’s cultural hub, extensively restored by IMM Heritage, preserving the historic Feshane-i Amire. Under the artistic direction of Angelo Bucarelli and Paola Marino, the exhibition combines works of the artist’s sublime spheres, whose quest is as metaphysical as tangibly formal and spurs thoughts and forms through overlapping spaces and objects.