The story begins in an ancient city called Lagash, located northwest of the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, in modern Iraq, but in the late third millennium BCE, it was an important city for the Sumerian kingdom. And it was from there that a hero, now known to be mythical, Urnamman, set on a journey fleeing persecution and the legend goes that the men filled their sandals with wool to prevent injuries in the course of a long journey, and at the end of his wanderings, the bodily motions and sweat had transformed the wool into felt socks. That’s when felt is first introduced in our cultural history and it would go on to have a very long life in the imaginary of the East. And when we use the term East, we want to use it holistically and in a nondescript way; to the east of what? That question remains unanswered.

The presence of this textile material is ubiquitous nowadays, the result of its widespread industrial use (a technique known as carroting, was invented in the 17th century, in order to mass-produce lower quality felts), but its history in the Near East, though it was already mention by ancient Greek authors, was largely defined by the Turkic peoples, who came, like the hero Urnamman, on a long journey from their ancestral home in the mountains of Altai, Central Asia, to the fertile and warmer lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, carrying their felt objects all along. The most salient feature in the nomadic lives of the Turkic peoples across the continents they inhabited, has been of course the yurt, a portable round tent traditionally covered with felt or skins, and topped with a wooden crown.

In Turkey this material history has been largely forgotten once the Turks (comprising a vast number of people from all the Turkic tribes who lived once as Ottoman subjects in a vast but formless and borderless territory) amalgamated themselves into a modern (Europe-desiring) nation state, and left behind many traditional practices, in order to blend with the cosmopolitan Arab Islam of Egypt and the Levant. But the ‘yurt’ didn’t leave the Turks: The word now used to mean ‘country’ or ‘home’, derives originally from an archaic Turkic word referring to the imprint left in the ground by a moved yurt, that made it identical with one’s homeland. In the 1930s for example, the Turkish government began an artistic program called “Yurt Gezileri” that commission painters to depict Anatolia as the ancestral land of the Turks.

Therefore the idea of domesticity has been established long before urbanization and modern housing (largely the making of urban Greeks and Armenians during Ottoman administrations), and intimately bound with felt and the yurt; the modern Kazakh word for yurt is telling in this respect: kıiz u?y (house of felt). When the sculptor Gu?nnur O?zsoy turned her attention to felt, in 2008, an unexpected conversation silently developed between the artist, on the one hand, concerned with the relationship between the life-forms of the universe and the obvious concrete forms of art, and on the other hand, a timeless material, particularly adaptable, and deeply embedded in the consciousness of a vast

transnational and transhistorical territory, across countless generations.

O?zsoy’s artistic language had been already fully developed up to that point and her signature organic forms were already known, so that this engagement with a radically different material wasn’t to change her course, but provided a ground for slower introspection and faced her with an inescapable postmodern gesture of contemporary art: The deconstruction of historical time, on the basis of which both Biblical time and the Greco-Roman image are suspended from their formative, canonical status. Thus, we, along our civilizational objects, begin to dwell in much larger temporal epochs, so that the far distant future of our art historical gaze, is always located in a remote past that predates our own current aesthetic paradigm. The past of the present cannot be changed, we are bound by its conventions, but the future is a different matter.

Certain strains of utopian imagination filter through the cracks of these felt-bound objects, as they defy their own formal and temporal limitations. What are they indeed? The opaque nature of the felt (opposed to the smooth, glimmering surfaces that have always characterized O?zsoy) gives the impression of latency, an object that has been abandoned for a long time and its status is lethargic, or perhaps one of the large stones that cover burial mounds? There’s a fluctuating dynamic ecosystem, the map of which has been lost for us, and while different permutations are possible, and these possible combinations emit a message that vibrates around us, the grammar is still undecipherable. The felt is also porous, it absorbs warmth, but also air and time, and as they reach the core, they become ossified into the material.

It has also been at the heart of O?zsoy’s practice to understand the nature of art to be dualistic, spiritual but material, heavy and light, ultimately serious yet banal and playful. In her works, the boundaries between the artwork, its architectural emplacement and the potency of a design object, have never been cleared or closed. In these felt works, nevertheless, there is a third power emerging that I believe, would resurface later in her series “Spiritual Experience” in 2011 and would accompany her ever after and it is the repurposing of the sculptural object into a ritual totem. These totemic constructions, as sacred objects, function not only as vessels for deep memory but also as emblems of a community, in the sense that their power cannot be accessed individually, it belongs to a community built on public memory and speech.

But it is important to notice here that this totemic structure is not monumental but domestic and sentimental instead. The monumental graveyards did not appear in the Near East until the Ottoman Empire, paradoxically, as a part of a Westernization project in which classical and neoclassical architecture (departing from Seljuk styles, seen as barbarian and too ‘Oriental’), was imitated and then adapted to the culture of the period that was in turn, the amalgamation of many cultures from East and West. This domestic totem resembles more the Lares, the household god in the Roman homes, and

precisely because of its mobility, the portable totem, resembles more than anything, the social dynamic of the felt yurt in its multi-layered combination of handcraft, tribalness, family structure, social space and inheritance.

For a traditional yurt, at first felt is made from the wool of the flocks of sheep that accompany the group, and then an expanding circular frame is made from timber, which needs to be obtained in the markets of the valleys, usually trading for sheep and goat products. Then the frame is covered with felt and skins, and is designed to be dismantled rapidly and carried on cattle to be rebuilt in the next site; it takes approximately two hours to complete the construction. Geometric patterns and sacred symbols are used for decoration that are later also used on furnitures and cushions, and then the yurt is topped with the shangyrak (Kazakh expression), a wooden crown that would be passed from father to son, even as the yurt would be repaired and replaced. More than a dwelling, the yurt is a multi-generational abode, the primary material of which is the felt.

Gu?nnur O?zsoy’s felt sculptures, represent also the serendipity of a journey, as the artist traveled to Konya, a city in central Anatolia, conquered by the Turks already in the 11th century, and the resting place of the Sufi mystic Rumi (he died in 1273), to meet with a traditional felt maker, and carry out the project. A mutual sense of excitement about bringing abstraction to life through this singular material complemented the polyphony that converges in this work. Konya, though reviled often by the obvious polarization of Turkish society along religious lines, is also the site of a great history which was already in motion by the time the Sumerian warrior Urnamman left Lagash to begin the world trip of felt. Like many places in Anatolia, it was later under the influences of the Hittites and was subsequently destroyed by the mysterious Sea Peoples.

The gesture of O?zsoy’s totemic felts in the language of the contemporary isn’t only the postmodern disruption of classical time and traditional history, but also recent shifts in the treatment of material that an exhibition in Sweden in 2018 termed ‘the new materialism’, addressing the need in a post-industrial society, to work with textile, wood, clay and ceramics. Of course these materials are always ubiquitous in art, but what we see here is a turn of major historical figures of the contemporary moment such as Sheila Hicks or Theaster Gates, turning back toward craftsmanship in order to explore not only aesthetic, but also social and political relations around manual labor. The key issue with the new materialism is that in order to remain new, it is necessary to disavow nostalgia and the cult of the past.

In the region, a number of very prominent female artists from the modern and early contemporary period, the likes of Saloua Raouda Choucair, Huguette Caland, Fahrelnissa Zeid and Gu?lsu?n Karamustafa, have been allegedly re-discovered (though in practice they have always been very well known) through craft: caftans, tapestries, embroideries and knitting, in a kind of really backward feminism that the contemporary moment has practiced extensively against post-colonial subjects in

order to locate the ‘authentic’ that is somehow not identical with Western or Westernized. The cult of the past associated with craft and the fundamentally biased attitude of the global curatorial circuit have not particularly helped the new materialism to acquire a serious voice, but it’s not insignificant either.

The felt sculptures represent for O?zsoy a discreet turning point, after which her otherwise architecturally solipsistic work, has acquired a social space of its own that is both historical and emotional. Seeing the organic felt forms, piled one on top of another, as if it was some kind of Tower of Babel split into sections, at her studio in the industrial quarters of Maslak, It’s difficult not to conjure up images of the insides of a mythical yurt, accumulating years of conversations with an artist at the very peak of her creative process. But yet, qualifying the experience merely as a memory of a collective imaginary would be a disservice to the third power of the ritual object at hand here. This is not a memory coming from the past, but one that is being endless constructed, in the present tense alone; in that sense it’s not a memory but a sense of direction.

The oldest remnants of felt found so far in the world, where located in the territory of what is now Turkey, dating back at least to 6,500 BC, and highly sophisticated felted artifacts have been found in permafrost in Siberia, along the path of the Turkic peoples into Anatolia. Before the introduction of the modern European idea of fine art (this didn’t happen before the middle of the 19th century), the material culture and artistic expression of peoples was present in a realm in which the domestic and the spiritual and the artistic were indistinguishable; as the Arabs and the Persians perfected monumental architecture and the making of carpets, the Turks continued their journey southwards, with the yurt and the felt as the empty canvas for their own -unrecorded and almost forgotten- equivalent of the Cave paintings of Altamira.

And it becomes interesting nevertheless to notice how the language of the primeval (not primitive but primeval, for primitivism is an Orientalist gaze) and contemporary abstraction, though unable to understand each other, hold the same species of gravitational force against the conventional demands of representational images and seek beyond. An exhibition at the British Museum half a decade ago, highlighted “art” (the definition is shaky) from the Ice Age (40000-10000 BC) as the moment when the modern mind was born, meaning by this the specific instance when the human brain cortex was already developed enough to think abstractly and/or in terms of symbols. European artifacts from the period make most of the show, making us rethink what is it what we mean when we say art.

The response is inconclusive, not only because of how modern in our contemporary sense, the idea of fine art is, but also because we do not know in any way what was the possible ritual or practical use of these stone figures in a world from which no languages have reached us, though we speculate it was by the end of this period that the first proto-ancestors of our modern languages were being spoken, long before writing. The timelessness inherent to O?zsoy’s totemic felts, is able to partake in this conversation, but of course without forgetting that we have, for better or worse, abandoned the world

of ritual and magic, and all what we have, in lieu of true transcendent experience, is the unfinished possibilities that contemporary art has promised, without yet having been able to deliver as much.

That the exhibition didn’t really have a curatorial text back in 2008, it has much to say not only about the personal circumstances of the artist, but also of a moment of transition in her practice and in the way Turkish artists looked at materials. Filled with the optimism of the democratization promise, pop art and the digital image occupied the old place of painting in the Turkish artistic imaginary, and the seduction of the West and contemporariness took over their narrative strategies. It is only in a moment of deep reflection, or catastrophe and its aftermath that it is again possible to look at these sculptures with any degree of attention or seriousness, and believe, that not unlike those felt pieces excavated from Anatolia, these portable totems need to be excavated again, and seen against the background of O?zsoy’s long career.

10 years is enough time for a series of works to breathe and acquire a vital space of their own, but at the same time not enough to become historicized. For the felt sculptures, then, the state of suspension continues to be their main feature; it is through this dislocation of the temporal on different levels at the same time that they become domesticated as household ghosts, not gods. As archaeological material, they contain no readable traces of the past other than pastness itself, and therefore, their totemic secrets are not available to the viewer; a dissection of the totem would reveal nothing but dead matter, lifeless material, whose entire architecture is based on a carefully guarded secret, the particulars of which can be never known. But we must always feed the household ghost, even when we’re uncertain of its existence, for its presence is inescapable.