Taklak research and archive

Taklak

Artistic research / Adana, Leipzig, İstanbul / Granted by SAHA (Supporting Contemporary Art from Turkey)

A plant among plants.
A companion.
The carrier of the Aegean landscape, the Taurus Mountains air, the sounds of Istanbul, and the dreams and myths wandering around the Eastern Mediterranean.

That plant is Taklak, known by many other names such as Zamzarik, Koutsoupia, Arguvan, Dara Cihûda, Judah Tree, Redbud or Cercis Siliquastrum. While longing for a land, sea and air, I left behind in 2021, Taklak became a companion to me. In Germany, a new setting where I was striving to belong to, they seeped into my dreams, as well as my fears. They took me to the new spheres in each and every turn.

The project, TAKLAK, registers this journey. It travels among archives, follows the footsteps of the botanists merged in landscape, pays visit to various plants, searches for the different representations of a plant, and explores the dreams and myths of the lands along the coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Thinking about and around how a plant can create intercultural belonging, Taklaks are transformed from objects of nostalgia to companions of resilience.

The journey is not only about findings and meetings but also about loss and exclusion. It wanders around the duality of being in parallel universes, belonging or not belonging. It searches for the dualities of destructive progress, and self-othering, which are the trajectories of the geography I grew up in and around.

As an artistic and archival research, it traverses the fields of etymology, ecology, and botany while dealing with the representations of unknown territories, climates, and languages. This is a story of gathering. This is a story of foraging. Seeds, names, meanings, symbols, stories, testimonies, and memories in notebooks, boxes, and bags are rooted and unrooted, spreading around and spinning around in this story and exploring the resilience of artistic inquiries.