Djochkoun Sami
Artist Statement
Djochkoun Sami’s paintings and drawings are about what history leaves out, and how personal and collective experience comes back in other forms, sometimes unrecognisable. Promised futures, abandoned aspirations, forgotten names and faces, and fragments of vanished worlds return in unexpected configurations. Born in 1973 in Bulgaria, Sami grew up under a communist regime that forcibly changed the names of the Turkish minority in the 1980s, before collapsing in 1989. His work draws on sources as different as the official aesthetics of the socialist era and the utopian ambitions of modernist architecture, past and present migrations and deportations, the Ottoman nostalgia of contemporary culture, the Gezi protests, the earthquakes of 1999 and 2023 in Turkey, and, more recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These histories do not form a continuous narrative. Their fragments surface alongside one another, acquiring new meanings through their encounters.
Architecture and the human figure frequently intertwine in Sami’s work. Buildings acquire faces, faces turn into masks and stone walls, and neither is allowed to remain intact. Villas, vaults, depots and parliaments recur, their original functions and associations unsettled as they enter new contexts. Around them come crowds, uniforms, sultans and pashas, and figures in masks and protective suits. Different times inhabit the same pictorial space without settling into a single chronology. Buildings and figures move between observation, memory and imagination; some remain recognisable, while others are transformed beyond recognition. The resulting scenes can be sombre, grotesque or unexpectedly tender.
Sami’s paintings inhabit the uncertain threshold between precise rendering and abstraction. Drawing lies at the heart of the tension between these two poles. In ink on paper he builds space through accumulated marks, stains, dense hatching and spatter, allowing deliberately induced accidents to interrupt and redirect the drawing. On canvas, rigid geometric structures confront sharp, fragmented textures of paint, and warm rust, earth and ember tones clash with cold grey-blues. Fire, smoke, rubble and vegetation emerge as consequences of what has taken place, not as decoration. Forms are constructed and dismantled, continually shifting their identities between architecture, landscape, object and figure. The scale runs from small drawings and canvases to works more than three metres wide, with occasional tondos, diptychs and triptychs.
Since 2006, Sami has kept "Absentpaedia", a series of small ink drawings conceived as a visual diary: “an encyclopaedia of regrets and things not registered, of feelings lost in the stream of life and events.” Literature, cinema, critical theory, history and political rhetoric supply titles, scenes and questions, and a passing phrase or image is often where a drawing begins. Memory is less a subject than a working material, continually erased, reconstructed and reshaped.
After studying classical drawing at a fine arts high school in Bulgaria, Djochkoun Sami moved to Turkey, where he completed both his BFA and MFA in painting at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul. He lives and works in Istanbul.
Architecture and the human figure frequently intertwine in Sami’s work. Buildings acquire faces, faces turn into masks and stone walls, and neither is allowed to remain intact. Villas, vaults, depots and parliaments recur, their original functions and associations unsettled as they enter new contexts. Around them come crowds, uniforms, sultans and pashas, and figures in masks and protective suits. Different times inhabit the same pictorial space without settling into a single chronology. Buildings and figures move between observation, memory and imagination; some remain recognisable, while others are transformed beyond recognition. The resulting scenes can be sombre, grotesque or unexpectedly tender.
Sami’s paintings inhabit the uncertain threshold between precise rendering and abstraction. Drawing lies at the heart of the tension between these two poles. In ink on paper he builds space through accumulated marks, stains, dense hatching and spatter, allowing deliberately induced accidents to interrupt and redirect the drawing. On canvas, rigid geometric structures confront sharp, fragmented textures of paint, and warm rust, earth and ember tones clash with cold grey-blues. Fire, smoke, rubble and vegetation emerge as consequences of what has taken place, not as decoration. Forms are constructed and dismantled, continually shifting their identities between architecture, landscape, object and figure. The scale runs from small drawings and canvases to works more than three metres wide, with occasional tondos, diptychs and triptychs.
Since 2006, Sami has kept "Absentpaedia", a series of small ink drawings conceived as a visual diary: “an encyclopaedia of regrets and things not registered, of feelings lost in the stream of life and events.” Literature, cinema, critical theory, history and political rhetoric supply titles, scenes and questions, and a passing phrase or image is often where a drawing begins. Memory is less a subject than a working material, continually erased, reconstructed and reshaped.
After studying classical drawing at a fine arts high school in Bulgaria, Djochkoun Sami moved to Turkey, where he completed both his BFA and MFA in painting at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul. He lives and works in Istanbul.
Education
2011, MFA, Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts, Faculty of Painting, Istanbul, TR
2004, BFA, Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts, Faculty of Painting, Istanbul, TR
1991, Nikola Y. Vaptsarov High School, Silistra, BG
2004, BFA, Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts, Faculty of Painting, Istanbul, TR
1991, Nikola Y. Vaptsarov High School, Silistra, BG