Turning the carpet from a nostalgic ornament into a contemporary surface of memory. By preserving and destabilizing the woven aesthetic, I place rural serenity and industrial tension within the same frame. These works explore what happens to beauty, threat, and the myth of progress when a familiar textile suddenly hosts an unfamiliar object. I mostly do things for fun and exploration, nothing too serious.
Artist Statement – Berkay Güngörmüş
There are many ways to interpret these works. After thinking about them carefully and looking at them from different angles, I decided to approach them through a humorous narrative. This feels more honest to my character as an artist and closer to the way I naturally relate to the work.
My name is Berkay Güngörmüş.
I make hand-painted wall rugs inspired by the carpets I remember from childhood. I grew up in a rapidly industrializing country, where wall carpets were common in homes with families who had moved from villages to cities in this changing world. These rugs often depicted pastoral landscapes, romanticized village scenes, heroic or dramatic moments, and other familiar folk narratives.
People brought them into their new urban apartments, carrying with them rural memories, domestic warmth, and decorative traditions from another way of life. Their colors, patterns, and atmosphere became part of my visual memory. What stayed with me was the contrast between the rural, simpler worlds shown on the rugs and the changing urban spaces in which they were displayed.
I am drawn to this traditional carpet language, but I didnt want to simply reproduce it. I like to disturb it a little: placing industrial, threatening, absurd, or contemporary images onto a surface that usually feels warm, nostalgic, and decorative.
In these works, I alter the familiar traditional imagery once associated with these rugs and use it as a way to think about change. Not as a single heroic idea of progress, but as something that can be absurd, destructive, subtle, humorous, or quietly unsettling. With a playful and traditional touch, the rugs invite viewers to notice how change enters familiar forms and transforms them from within.
I mostly approach these pieces through curiosity, play, and exploration. For me, the rug is not only a nostalgic object; it is a surface where past and present, beauty and tension, tradition and contemporary life can meet.