Images drawn from a family archive, time slowed down through embroidery, repeated gestures and half-finished gazes… The most familiar moments of everyday life transform here into a reconstructed space of memory. We come together with Mustafa Boğa—who moves between Adana and London, building a language between personal history and collective narratives—to talk about the fragmented nature of belonging, how memory is rewritten, and the layers carried by seemingly ordinary moments. Bodies gathered around the table, gestures repeated in weddings, and traces of childhood preserved in archives come side by side; we begin to reflect on this fragile yet persistent connection between past and present.
You often include scenes from your childhood, family life, and the geography you grew up in. How does personal memory become a space of production for you? What kind of selection and transformation process takes place as you translate these fragments into an artistic language?
For me, personal memory is not a fixed archive but a constantly reconstructed space. When working with images from my childhood, family, and the place I grew up, I’m not trying to represent the past as it was; rather, I reconstruct it from the perspective of the present.
The selection process usually begins intuitively. Sometimes a photograph, sometimes a video fragment, or even an everyday gesture catches my attention. As I bring these images together, I follow the emotional and visual relationships between them. Through interventions such as embroidery, montage, or repetition, I transform these images. In this process, the image shifts away from being a documentary record into a more fragile, subjective space.
For me, memory is less a verifiable past and more a constantly rewritten narrative. I think this is why many artists return to their childhood and the places they grew up. Those periods belong to experiences that are unfiltered, raw, and direct. That’s why they contain some of the most powerful images, both personally and collectively. For me, this space is not just about looking back—it’s a ground for understanding who I am today.
You continue your practice between Adana and London. How does moving between these two different geographies and cultural atmospheres affect both your subject matter and your visual language? How do these transitions shape your narratives around memory, belonging, and identity?
Moving between Adana and London is one of the core dynamics of my practice. These two places differ not only physically but also emotionally and culturally, each operating at different speeds and structures.
Adana is more connected to memory, ritual, and roots, while London creates space for distance, observation, and rethinking. Moving between these two poles constantly pushes me to question both what I belong to and what I distance myself from.
This questioning is also directly connected to my family history. My family is part of a community that has had to relocate throughout history. We come from a Lebanese-origin Alevi background and lived along the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly near the Syrian coast. This historical movement has made the idea of belonging something that has never felt fixed for me.
The Levantine Arabic I heard at home growing up—but can no longer speak—is also an important part of this rupture. Losing that language means losing not only a means of communication but also a form of memory.
That’s why, in my work, belonging is not a fixed condition but a fragmented, fluid, and constantly reconstructed structure. These transitions allow feelings of both intimacy and estrangement to coexist within the work.
The geography of Adana and the Mediterranean forms both a textural and symbolic ground in your work. How do the everyday rituals, nature, and cultural imagery of this region shape your practice?
My connection to the Mediterranean is not limited to where I live; it is also tied to my family’s history across the Eastern Mediterranean. For this reason, the region carries both a personal and historical memory for me. Everyday rituals, seasons, light, heat, and human relationships form the fundamental layers of this practice.
Recurring images such as oranges, fire, or wreaths come from both the everyday and symbolic language of this geography. When working with these images, I’m less interested in representing them as they are and more in transforming the meanings they carry.
For me, this geography is not just a backdrop; it is a structure that builds the narrative itself—a space that carries both personal and collective memory.
In your video installation Because Ours Could Have Been the Beginning of a Beautiful Tale Dreamed of for Years, you reconstruct nearly thirty-eight years of wedding footage. What kind of emotional and intellectual process did working with this archive initiate for you? What do these repeated rituals over time tell you?
In this work, I used approximately thirty-eight years of wedding footage from my family archive. Encountering these images again felt almost like an archaeological excavation. In every frame, I was searching for a trace of myself—sometimes outside the camera, sometimes within the crowd, sometimes as a child looking directly into the lens.
While watching these moments, the gap between what I remembered and what I saw became very clear. There was a distance between the images I carried in my memory and the recorded reality, and this distance pushed me to rethink the images.
This process was also a moment of confronting myself. Moving back and forth between my past self and who I am today, I began to feel more clearly that time is not linear. Past, present, and future intertwined—sometimes it became difficult to distinguish one from the other.
The repeated gestures, movements, and gazes in wedding rituals reminded me of a collective choreography. Everyone has their own story, yet within the same structure we repeat similar roles. This repetition creates a feeling that is both familiar and, at times, unsettling.
Working with these images also allowed me to look at my childhood from an external perspective. The fact that these moments are both public and deeply personal made the work even more layered. The resulting installation is not just an archive; it is a reconstruction of my relationship with memory, identity, and time.
In Dinner, you create a simple yet powerful sense of togetherness through a floor table where only hands are visible. What kind of social or emotional space does the table represent for you?
The image I used in Dinner was something I shot about ten years ago. After I began working with embroidery, I started revisiting my family photo albums more often, and I encountered this image during that process. Most of the time, I don’t look through these archives with a specific intention; instead, I reconnect with them intuitively, through my present perspective.
The scene in the photograph belongs to a very ordinary family evening—an unplanned visit to cousins, a table set with whatever was available that day. Leftovers from the day before, fries added on top, chicken, okra… It’s a very everyday and modest moment. But within that ordinariness, there is a strong sense of togetherness.
As I reworked this image through embroidery, I was able to slow down and reconsider the emotional texture of that moment. The table becomes more than just a place for eating; it turns into a space where relationships are formed, repeated, and remembered. For me, these kinds of images are both deeply personal and open to shared experiences in which anyone can find a fragment of themselves. Embroidery becomes a way of revisiting these moments and establishing a physical and temporal connection with them.
In the context of increasingly fast-paced and individualized ways of living today, what kind of remembering or resistance does the table scene in your work offer?
As I mentioned earlier, the table scene offers a space for slowing down and remembering. It’s not just a place for eating together; it’s a space where time flows at a different rhythm, where relationships are formed and repeated. The time spent there suggests a slower, more attentive mode of being, distinct from the pace of everyday life.
That’s why the table scenes in my work invite us to reconsider a mode of togetherness that is gradually disappearing. However, this is not about romanticizing the past—it’s also a space that reminds us of how fragile and temporary that togetherness is.
At the same time, these scenes question how shared experiences are transforming in a world where individualization is increasing. The meaning, form, and necessity of being together are reconsidered. In this sense, the table becomes both a form of resistance and a practice of remembering—a layered space that holds past and present at once.
You work with different techniques such as video, performance, and free embroidery. Are these different mediums tools to expand the narrative, or do they emerge to express specific ideas?
Working across different mediums is a way for me to expand the narrative, but this was not a predetermined choice. When I first started making art, I didn’t have a formal art education, so I didn’t have a fixed technique or medium. This actually opened up a great deal of freedom for me.
Over time, I realized that each project brings its own language and mode of production. Some works require movement and time, so they emerge as video or performance; others require slower, repetitive, and physical intervention, so they take the form of embroidery.
In this process, I began trying things I had never done before. Mediums like performance or embroidery often entered my practice not through deliberate planning, but through experimentation and experience. Sometimes the work itself determines the form it wants to take; other times, an experimental process opens up a new direction.
That’s why I don’t see mediums as separate—they are different surfaces of the same narrative. What matters is how the idea can best find its form.
At the same time, I think repetition plays an important role in the production process. The reason many artists return to the same subject or method again and again is not to exhaust it, but to deepen it. For me, embroidery is a physical manifestation of that repetition. As I repeat the same gestures, both the image and the thought gradually transform. Over time, this allows me to build a more intense and layered narrative.