The Form

The installation’s central object is a hand-built ceramic book: two porcelain covers, glazed to match the sculptures, Coptic-stitched around a printed edition of Prelude to Memory using an ancient, glue-free binding method. Displayed open on a compass-aligned plinth, its left page pointing West, its right page East, the book collapses the distinction between the written and the sculptural that runs through the whole project, giving the text a material, orientable presence in the room rather than treating it as separate from the objects around it. The wider installation places the book and four sculptures across a moss-covered floor, its softness and rootlessness meant to hold viewers as they sit with the memories the text recounts.

The Text

Prelude to Memory (text) is a bidirectional text that can be read starting from the “West” or the “East.” It explores inherited memory through the retelling of the lives of the author’s mother and father: her childhood in West Germany, where her Turkish heritage was silenced within the family and wider community, and his childhood in China, born just before the Cultural Revolution, where cultural suppression marked an entire nation.

The text is written in the second person, addressing the parents rather than speaking as them, which avoids appropriating their voices while echoing the way memory itself is transmitted, through dialogue. For every memory recounted, the point of origin has to be a real, transmitted memory. Fictionalisation is only allowed at the level of detail, never in the general facts of what happened. No interviews were conducted with family members, since that would disrupt the organic way memory is passed down, and the whole point of the work is to explore that process. Memories are written mostly in the present tense, since trauma is something re-experienced in the present, even long after the original event has passed.

Prelude to Memory (text) is as much a personal family history as a collective one. It touches, implicitly rather than explicitly, on how memory gets institutionalised and controlled. Where the family’s own record falls silent, whether through her grandmother’s choices or through Maoist censorship, the writing turns to critical fabulation and mythorealism to work responsibly within those archival, and historical empty spaces.

The text is also conceived as a literal landscape, shaped by orientation, directionality, and perspective. Its “West” half reads left to right, as is habitual in Western reading. Its “East” half reads right to left, as was traditional in China. As the reader turns the pages, the two halves walk toward each other, converging at the point where the author’s parents meet, an ending that is also the beginning of her own existence: a prelude to her own memory. Structure and content mirror one another. Approaching the text this way, as three-dimensional, as landscape, is what first opened the door to the sculptural practice that runs through the rest of the work.