Lazarus
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.
Named places, ancestral faces
Kırkağaç, Kelempes, grandmother, grandfather and ancestor images are central here. They turn DNA from data into a visual language of place, kinship and survival.
Public memory and witness
The same root later opens into Recovered Histories, the Istanbul work, foreign saints, illuminated surfaces and the wider archive ecology of carrying memory forward.
Following my explorations in DNA relationships and ways of tracing the movements of my ancestors around the world, I reached a point where the search felt like an attempt to resurrect the past. That is why the title became Lazarus. It names the act of restoring something lost, but also the melancholy that comes with painful discoveries.
Both my parents were refugees, escaping war and death. In this work I was trying to move beyond the earlier Personal Maps, while keeping the connection with psychogeography and cultural history. The map did not disappear. It entered the face.
The names matter. Kırkağaç and Kelempes are not decorative references. They are part of the structure of the branch: named places where ancestry, refuge, displacement and the fragile survival of memory become visible.
In Lazarus, the head is not a portrait in the ordinary sense. It is a place of crossings. Children, trees, boats, broken sculpture, stones and journeying figures gather inside it.
The face becomes a terrain rather than a likeness.
This is a primary work in the branch. The map on the face and in the background points towards Izmir and to Kırkağaç, where my grandmother’s family had lived. The work is about my grandmother, but it is also about community, refuge and the conditions that allow people to survive.
A lost or threatened place becomes a face.
The grandfather image belongs beside Kırkağaç. The portrait depicts my grandfather, but the title on the print is Kelempes, the place where he was born, now no longer on any map. That absence is central to the work.
The person and the lost place are held together.
The ancestor images are not background decoration. In later composite works, they sit in the leaves, in the beard, in the map and in the body of the image. They make the individual face porous, carrying earlier lives without reducing identity to a single origin.
The self is not alone. It is inhabited by inherited narratives.
These works sit between the mapping works and the later public-history projects. They explain why the archive in the later work is never only documentary. It is bodily, familial and emotionally charged.
This branch gives the later civic work its ancestral pressure.
The vocabulary of face, map, fragment and historical pressure could become large enough to enter civic or educational space. This is one reason the branch matters. It joins private ancestry to a visual language that can later move outward.
The branch does not replace the trunk. It makes one direction of growth visible.Why this branch matters
Lazarus, Kırkağaç, Kelempes and the ancestor images should be read together. They form the DNA and ancestral-place branch of the wider practice.
This is where data becomes grief, where geography enters the face, and where named places become part of the visual structure of memory.
To resurrect the past is not to make it whole again. It is to admit that some fragments still call to us, and that looking carefully is one form of responsibility.
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