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.
Manifesto
The Human Spectrum in a Fractured Landscape
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.
Artist
Berkay Güngörmüş
A text briefly summarizes my position and motivation to create visual art.
Amid the densely populated and ever-interconnected world, solitude permeates our societies, a paradox of our time. My work captures the alienation born from this paradox, the profound loneliness of the human spirit in the age of hyper-communication.
The sharp cleavages of wealth and opportunity are not just economic constructs. They shape minds, bend wills, and distort self-perceptions. Through my art, I strive to document these invisible scars, bringing to light the deep-seated psychological effects of income disparity and social injustice.
The economic order of our era is not merely a mechanistic system of production and distribution. It defines and distorts our social concepts, shaping our understanding of worth, achievement, and identity. My work peels back these layers, revealing the ways in which the global economic order influences, and often warps, social constructs.
The individual, though small against the vast backdrop of society and its colossal systems, carries a story of resilience and struggle. My images capture these lone warriors, illuminating the narrative of the everyday man and woman facing the machinery of our times.
Faced with insurmountable challenges, accepting defeat can often become a mechanism of survival. My work seeks to explore this intricate psychology, documenting the poignant moments of surrender and the quiet dignity within them.
My art is a portal to the socio-economic landscape of our society. Each frame, each click, is a slice of this dynamic, complex, and often disquieting reality. My photos bear witness to the forces that shape our lives, striving to provoke thought, empathy, and change.
The diverse range of my subjects is bound by a consistent aesthetic, one that prioritizes authenticity, starkness, and emotional honesty. My art seek not just to portray but to communicate, to reach out to the viewer with an unspoken language of shared humanity.
In this bustling world of ours, teeming with constant, dizzying movement, we are all wanderers, wanderers in time, in space, in social lattices, and in the mazes of our own minds. I am a street photographer, and my lens seeks to capture the echoes of these odysseys: the whispers of the wanderers, unadorned, raw, and resonating with truth.