The Lost Alphabet
Güneştekin Sanat, January 2025
368 pages
English
Design: Oya Çitçi, Emir Suat Darman
ISBN: 978-625-97417-1-0
The book published for the “Lost Alphabet” addresses the questions that stir the contemporary art world and discusses Güneştekin’s works that continue to spur thoughts and forms. The book opens with a foreword by Murat Ülker that introduces his accounts of experiencing the artist’s works. In his curatorial introduction, Christopher Tanner articulates the myriad of elements crystallised into a symbolic language that constitutes the raw materials of the artist’s works. By focusing on the local scale as an object of curiosity, Tannert pens, the artist is induced to examine his immediate cultural context and make it legible through an international style. In a lengthy conversation, Şener Özmen and Ahmet Güneştekin converse about the urgent questions of rethinking new scales and models for the art world and the problems of the cultural production of locality inside a global worldview. The book features works that forge bonds across cultural, geographic, linguistic, and temporal boundaries, and sensitively deal with loss and transgressions. These works reveal fragile boundaries of worlds oscillating between existence and disappearance while at the same time rendering visible transitioning processes such as migration and displacement. Sponsored by Yıldız Holding, the book’s design reflects the curatorial concepts of the exhibition, and the installation photographs accompany the conceptual texts that arrange the visual, spatial, and material environment into a composition the reader moves through.