Models on the tables, dried flowers in the corners, forms from different times scattered throughout the studio… It’s spacious, orderly, and filled with light. The moment you walk in, it feels like spring. This is where we meet Burçak Bingöl. We talk about a practice that moves between ceramics, drawing, photography, and installation. She copies familiar forms, traces them, breaks them apart, and builds them again. Sometimes she looks at an object. Sometimes a flower. Sometimes an image carried over from the past. As she thinks through belonging, cultural heritage, and identity, she creates new connections between East and West. A space opens up where the familiar can change, and an object can tell a different story when we look at it again. We step into this fairytale-like world with her.
In your interdisciplinary practice, which spans ceramics, drawing, photography, and installation, material seems to function not only as a medium but also as a carrier of thought. Are there moments when a material suggests a new idea to you?
I liked the definition of a carrier of thought; it’s very accurate. Because my practice is inherently closely connected to ornamentation and tradition, its conceptual dimension can often be overlooked.
Every material has its own nature, rules, and ways of being; within these, there are both new limitations and new discoveries and possibilities. It’s an area that is as unsettling as it is exciting… Alongside materials, objects, fragments of nature, and, most importantly, the meanings we assign to them are a major source of meaning and inspiration for me. Their relationship to time and context is what I move through with excitement and what makes the present meaningful to me. New materials—even when they are simply raw materials—can sometimes suggest ideas that surprise me, either quickly or through a process of maturation that unfolds over time.
You frequently use methods of copying, tracing, breaking down, and reconstructing in your work. What is the fundamental motivation that drives you to transform familiar forms?
Before 2010, my work in Ankara was primarily concerned with modularity, systems, and their relationship to space. When I moved to Istanbul, I had a major realization; recognizing the history here and the distance between it and myself gave my practice an entirely new direction. Ceramics, the material I was working with, was also perhaps the best possible medium in the context of Turkey. For this reason, I began looking at the past and tradition; at forms and images that were both familiar and very distant. For me, the past is a site of artistic excavation; reexamining it and translating it into the present is also an important subject. My fundamental motivation is to look at the place, the geography I inhabit, to produce using the subjects and materials found here, and to construct new connections and forms of engagement.
Your work establishes a strong dialogue between Eastern and Western visual traditions. How do you see the potential of these two visual memories to transform one another?
These visual memories have a much greater influence on one another than we might think. For example, what we see as Ottoman, when we look closely enough, can turn out to be Chinese or Persian. In the research project I’ve been working on since 2017, focused on a 16th-century tile panel, I discovered these relationships with a sense of both wonder and admiration, and they have had a profound influence on European art.
My practice also focuses precisely on the direction of this influence. Along the East-West axis, it is very clear that this relationship has historically operated in favor of the West, both through its colonial past and through strong, focused cultural programs. At least, this was the case for a long time. Art is a very important and influential political space. Today, the situation is somewhat different; both the West’s own decolonization programs and the desire of cultures outside the West to rediscover and establish themselves are changing this balance.
Rather than addressing concepts such as belonging, cultural heritage, and identity directly, you approach them through materials and objects. How do you think objects carry the memories of societies and individuals?
Here, they carry them quietly, as if waiting to be heard. When I occasionally hear their voice in literature or in a historical text, I feel as though a root comes alive as well… The life that forms around these objects is our most valuable common ground. I feel that we haven’t thought enough about this sense of sharedness. This visual grammar and these objects, which we are familiar with, even “tired” of seeing, are always part of our lives. I find the act of looking at these objects from the perspective of today valuable in itself. My focus is on transforming the memory and tradition they carry, as an artist of the present, and creating new forms of connection.
In your work featured in the Echoes of the Earth exhibition, you reconfigure traditional ceramic forms with floral motifs, creating disruptions within a familiar aesthetic. For you, are these interventions more a way of preserving the past, or an invitation to establish a new relationship with tradition?
Both are true. Memory and preservation. For me, tradition remains in the past, closed in on itself and disconnected from life unless it moves through time—that is, unless it is carried into the present. Using these traditional ceramic forms to create new dreams and ideas is part of a continuity that extends from the past into the future… Rather than thinking of it as the great responsibility of preserving and/or carrying this weighty heritage, I prefer to imagine and create as a small part of this continuity. The works shown in this exhibition are from the "Restlessness in Hasbahçe" series, and they feature images of roses. And in the future, I dream of being able to create a real rose garden myself.