Studio Notes · March 2025
Kızılkoyun Necropolis in Şanlıurfa, Turkey. (Above) Housing settlements built in the 1980s. (Below) Tombs revealed after the removal of the houses.
ON MY MIND
The City of the Dead.
My trip was to Şanlıurfa, a city in southeastern Turkey on the northern edge of what’s known as the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia. My dearest friend of almost 40 years and travel companion, Suri, and I headed there to visit Göbekli Tepe — an essay for another month— and stayed at a hotel adjacent to Kızılkoyun necropolis, “The City of the Dead,” photographed above.
The necropolis, dating back to the 2nd century AD under Hellenistic and Byzantine rule, consists of tombs carved into limestone bedrock. In the late 1970s, as domestic migration in Turkey increased, informal housing encroached on the site. In 2011, some houses were demolished, and the necropolis' edge was restored as a historic site, while the rest remains buried beneath neighborhoods.
Reading through the accounts from archeologists and local officials, the modern-day “slums” are described as a blemish on local history. And, yes, from a preservation perspective, the haphazard construction certainly caused irrevocable loss to historical artifacts. On the surface, the contemporary settlers appear to be breaking the law, disregarding the cultural heritage of the site, and seizing an opportunity out of sheer necessity for shelter and survival.
Perhaps, through a lens of wishful (delusional?) thinking, I envision a different experience behind the scenes. Could the settlers have formed an intimate connection with the past, moving through layers of history as they moved through the rooms in their homes? Maybe some took solace in the 2000-year-old mosaics surrounding them as they drew the curtains on their 20th-century reality outside. What if instead of disregarding the heritage and past lives led in their environs, they engaged in daily, subtle acts of reverence?
Impromptu photo shoot by the service entrance of my studio building.
WITH MY HANDS
The Seed.
I’m currently preparing my application for an exhibition that invites responses to how our personal histories, cultural contexts, societal structures, and institutional systems shape us, and how, as artists, we respond to and transform these influences.
These ideas swirl in my mind as I am working in the studio, but there are also times when things feel quieter, when I’m simply trying to make something I consider beautiful.
In that search, I often return to a visual organizational device—an established structure that prefigures everything that will unfold within the work. I say “unfold” because I’m usually looking for some form of change, expression, aberration, or idiosyncrasy within the system that might otherwise feel all-encompassing. The change may emerge through color, texture, or some other agent of contrast. I’m searching for new spaces within old structures. A seed.
Does the work do what I intend? And does the text accompanying the application accurately describe or support what the work is doing? Applying to calls is a helpful exercise in framing the work and discovering ways of articulating intention. But much of the magic seems to be somewhere in the gap — that space between what is said and what is felt.
Archeological Museum courtyard looking toward the necropolis.
FROM THE HEART
New Age.
In the photo above, I am standing at the courtyard of the Şanlıurfa Archeology Museum, looking through an elegant architectural screen toward the Kızılkoyun necropolis beyond. The museum is one of the most spectacular of its kind in Turkey, displaying the region's cultural heritage covering a time period that stretches from the Neolithic to the Ottoman era, or about 12,000 years.
As I admire the shimmering light on the stones and metallic inserts of the screen, I recall the sprawling conversation Suri and I had with Yakup, our local guide and farmer. He spoke about cultivating pistachio trees, the impossibly high cost of farming equipment loans, and the archaeological sites submerged by Turkey’s largest infrastructure project. Raised in a Kurdish-speaking household, surrounded by Arabic-speaking friends, while using Turkish in public, Yakup also talked about returning to his hometown after decades away and finding the persistence of a centuries-old feudal system still at work, and his choice not to fast during Ramadan in favor of trying a new-agey detox.
Where I get kind of stuck is what Yakup says unassumingly as we drive back from the outskirts into Şanlıurfa traffic: “I live in and for the past of this city, not the present, nor the future.”
I suppose some of us occupy the thresholds of time, the in-between spaces of change from one era to another, being pulled forward by life and yet looking backwards in history. I am wondering if it is wisdom in practice, an escape from reality, or somehow both.
Until next month, hoşçakalın!