Hüseyin Aksoy

Hüseyin Aksoy (b.1995, Mardin Kızıltepe) graduated from Marmara University Fine Arts Painting Department and participated in the Istanbul Biennial Study and Research Program in 2022. His artistic practice focuses on research and tracing, utilizing various mediums such as paintings, archives, videos, and photo collages to explore and understand these pathways. He reinterprets and reconstructs data that defines collective memory, examining the spaces, imes, and systems that shape historical narratives. Aksoy aims toinvestigate the representation of cultural destruction, the historical narratives based on representation, and the narrative construct&on of colonial discourse. In this context, he looks at imaginary geographies to explore intercultural relations, dispossessed lands, and the archaeology of these lands. 

When you burn the past, the fire saves it, as ashes

I will succomb to my own ruins

    I is two, the one that I may be and the one that I am.

And one is to destroy the other, eventually

Christian Morgenstern

The ongoing work titled When you burn the past, the fire saves it, as ashes, focuses on the symbiotic relationship of a plant with ruins, through paintings acting as a surface, found objects encountered on a trail and a video work that emerges as a narrative of time.

The paintings made with walnut paint on paper are sort of contemplation of reparation, which takes ruins, stones, ruins as a subject and considers them as the crust of the human body. Its usage dating back to prehistoric times, walnut dye had been used in ancient Egypt as a solution applied to the bodies of the deceased as a preservative against deterioration, and later became one of the materials used in architectural restoration due to the same building-protective effect. By means of these paintings made with walnut paint, which was employed to repair the bodies of both humans and buildings, the question of why we repair something comes to the fore. Along with these paintings, various found objects that the artist encountered while on the trail, spread across the floor of the SAHA Studio space like an archaeological excavation site, invite the viewer to wander through them. 

In his video work titled Harmel, Aksoy pays attention to this plant known in Latin as Paganum Harmala, which grows only in ruins and graveyards, as well as its relationship with ruins and what lies beneath the ground. The Harmel plant, which is commonly seen in areas of ancient settlements and ruins, prefers soils rich in phosphoric acid. As a matter of fact, phosphorus is the most contained element in human body after the mineral calcium. For this reason, archaeologists, in their quest to find evidence of past lives, would track down this plant and excavate the places where it grows. Therefore, the Harmel plant, which grows abundantly in ruins, mounds and visible or yet indiscernible graveyards, takes on the identity of a plant that waits for someone to die in order to exist. Can it be said that such a plant speaks for the dead?

Exploring the plant's relationship with ruins, Aksoy tries to read stones, remains and ruins as ghostly beings that are the mediators of confronting the past. In this landscape where the plant and the ruins speak, he points to silence as a third person listening to those who speak.