Witnesses Through Thousands of Years
Güneştekin Sanat, January 2025
204 pages
English
Design: Timuçin Unan
ISBN: 978-625-97417-3-4
Prepared especially for the “Witnesses Through Thousands of Years” section curated by Hasan Mert Kaya as part of the “Lost Alphabet” exhibition, the publication features works that Güneştekin created based on coins, which are the product of the last three thousand years of Anatolia’s cultural geography. Focusing on coins as metal witnesses of extreme passions and delusions that survived transformations, the curatorial articles suggest that to understand the stories shown by these testimonies, we should first voyage to the edge of historical time and prehistory and look beyond them. In the publication, each piece in the “Witnesses Through Thousands of Years” series is accompanied by the narrative its mythology is based on and the image of the coin from which the narrative originated. These narratives involve the rich world of Hellenic mythology, the flood of Persians from East to West, the Great Alexander’s ambition to conquer the ancient world prancing on the back of his infamous timeless horse Bucephalos, the flames of revenge of Mithridates – the Poison King of the Black Sea, the mighty names of the Roman Empire such as Julius Caesar, Brutus, Mark Antonius, and Cleopatra, traces of the Seven Sleepers, of Judas betraying Jesus, Aelia Pulcheria – the benevolent empress of Byzantium, Justinian – the prisoner of Thedora’s ambitions, women who lamented the death of Saladin Ayyubi – the most beloved king of the east before whom even his enemies bowed with respect in the face of his nobility, the crescent of the Turkmens who stood against the Crusades, the Seljuk wisdom that brought to life the most aesthetic works of Anatolia, and the secrets of Fatih Sultan Mehmet, who marked the beginning of a new era.