Painting, memory and the persistence of history

Djochkoun Sami (b. 1973, Bulgaria) is a contemporary artist based in Istanbul. His paintings and drawings move between figuration and abstraction, bringing architecture, landscape and fragments of history into unstable pictorial spaces. Rather than documenting particular locations, the works often reconstruct them through memory, association and painterly invention.
Abandoned buildings, modernist structures, ruins and displaced objects recur as carriers of memory rather than representations of specific places. Across these shifting scenes, traces of human presence, political history and transformation remain visible without resolving into a single narrative.