SAGALASSOS - THE FAULT LINES OF MEMORY

In Sagalassos: The Silence of Memory, I return to one of Anatolia’s great mountain cities—set high in the Pisidian Taurus range at 1,700 metres above sea level, where human life has unfolded since the Bronze Age. I do not approach the site as an archaeological record, but as an atmosphere: a space where mountains dissolve into one another like fading recollections, and ancient ridgelines are recast as shifting bands of color and form.

The series unfolds as a meditation on distance and time. At this altitude, the air thins and the land feels suspended, echoing the quiet fragility of memory itself. The mountains, stripped to their essential silhouettes, carry the weight of civilizations while simultaneously slipping into abstraction—reminding us how every landscape is both eternal and vanishing.

Working with reductive forms and deep chromatic fields, I reimagine the topography as emotional strata: longing, erosion, endurance, and the silent continuity of nature after human presence fades. Each piece becomes a dialogue between the physical world and its psychological echo, mirroring how memory behaves—expanding and collapsing, sharpening and softening with time.

Sagalassos is a place where history is held in stone, yet in these works it becomes a pulse: a quiet rhythm of color and shadow that speaks less about the ruins and more about our own fleetingness against the vastness of the earth. In this series, the mountains are not scenery; they are witnesses.