Istanbul

Nomadic Tales

Nomadic Tales emerged from the earlier Şeytan Tüyü project and represents the most ambitious realisation of ideas developed through more than a decade of engagement with the fragments attributed to Siyah Kalem. Produced following the 2019 exhibition at Halka Sanat Projesi in Istanbul, the project transformed the intimate scale of painting into an immersive installation environment.

The title refers to the wandering figures that populate Siyah Kalem's surviving images. Travellers, performers, demons and nomads move between places, cultures and stories, carrying experiences with them. This sense of movement became central to the work. Enlarged to architectural scale and suspended throughout the gallery, the figures create a landscape through which visitors are invited to walk, pause and explore.

As in the earlier paintings, the forms function as vessels. Graffiti, political stencils, architectural details, fragments of text and traces gathered from everyday life in Istanbul accumulate within the figures. However, in Nomadic Tales these images are no longer encountered individually. Instead, they form a shifting environment where relationships emerge between neighbouring works, allowing the audience to move physically through the project in the same way one might navigate a city.

Presented at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, Nomadic Tales transformed the gallery into a space of journey, encounter and discovery. Bringing together ideas first developed in Istanbul and expanding them to architectural scale, the installation represented the most comprehensive public presentation of the project. Through movement, immersion and participation, visitors were invited to navigate a landscape of stories, memories and cultural identities carried across time and place.