GEORGE SFOUGARAS ARTWORKS

DNA · ancestry · migration · 2018 Lazarus A branch of the work where DNA, ancestral movement, named lost places, map and face began to fuse into one field of memory. I began with DNA analysis, but the work quickly became less about proof than about the attempt to restore something that had been scattered. Lazarus · DNA 2018 ✦ This is not the trunk of the work. Lazarus is an ancestral-recovery branch from an older root system: family rupture, lost places, map, face, print, sacred fragment and the need to keep history visible. The primary works in this branch are not only Lazarus itself. They include Kırkağaç , Kelempes , the ancestor images carried inside later portraits, and the wider language of map, face and inherited place. Older root Maps and inherited geography Before Lazarus there were the personal maps, the lost places, the family stories and the recurring question of how a person carries a place after it has disappeared. This branch Named places, ancest...

George Sfougaras · 2019 Recovered Histories Metaphors of historical events, changing identities and fluid political landscapes. “What is uncovered here is light and love, deep and wide enough to embrace all our stories.” Rita Hindocha, from the foreword; arrived as a refugee from Uganda, 1972 ◆   ◆   ◆ Recovered Histories is not the trunk of the work, but one of its clearest public branches. The trunk is older and wider: inherited memory, displacement, archive, faith, loss, witness, repair and the material language of print. In this project those concerns entered a public, collaborative and civic form. Older trunk The continuing root system The work comes from a longer practice concerned with inherited memory, family rupture, faith, sacred fragments, migration, archive, print, object and light. This branch A public and civic form Here those private and ancestral concerns opened outwards into shared testimony, public history and collaborative rememb...

Artist book · family history · Istanbul · Crete Traces Fragments of a father, a city, and the long effort to hold memory without making it false. Traces is not simply a book about the past. It is a work of repair: a way of piecing together a father's life, a family's movement, and the broken evidence left by displacement. ✦ The work gathers drawings, photographs, manuscript fragments, remembered stories and historical wounds into one visual field. It does not pretend that the missing parts can be restored completely. Its strength lies in accepting the fragment as fragment, then treating it with care. At its centre is the figure of a father born in Istanbul in 1911 and forced, as a child, into the upheavals that reshaped Greek, Turkish, Armenian and other communities across the region. But the book is not only about one man. It is about how inherited history enters the body of the next generation: through names, places, faces, silences and repeated acts of recons...

Developing Your Creative Practice · Istanbul · 2024 Istanbul and Constantinople: Echoes Through Time A personal artistic odyssey through shared histories, minority memory, sacred places and the afterlives of displacement. This project was a return to a city that was never simply one city. Istanbul and Constantinople became a way of working through memory, inheritance, fracture and repair. ✦ In August 2024 I travelled to Istanbul as part of an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project. The journey followed family memory, but it also moved beyond family. It became a study of place, faith, minority survival, visual traces, and the fragile possibility of reconciliation. My father was born in Istanbul in 1911 and left as a child after the upheavals that reshaped the lives of Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Turkish communities across the region. The project did not set out to turn that history into grievance. It set out to look carefully at what remains when ...