- Visual Art
- Installation
What Remains
Görkem Gölbasi
3 July 2026 19:00 – 5 July 2026 19:00
What Remains is a sculptural installation that reflects on containment, transformation, and the traces left by movement and passage. The work brings together distorted ceramic amphoras and poppies encased in black clay, staged in a shared spatial constellation.
Amphoras are approached both as vessels and as archaeological artefacts shaped by ancient and colonial trade routes. Designed to separate inside from outside, they appear here altered and unstable, their forms disrupted. Positioned facing one another, they establish a relational space rather than a fixed boundary. Between them, a frame holds a mirror placed slightly outside its own limits. The viewer’s reflection never fully aligns, unsettling distinctions between observer and object, interior and exterior.
Across different myths and symbolic traditions, the poppy appears at thresholds: between sleep and waking, life and death, dream and reality. Covered in black clay, organic material burns within during firing. The interior is not revealed but transformed, leaving residue, ash, and trace. The flower becomes a material figure of suspension, holding multiple meanings without resolving them.
Rather than treating borders as lines to be crossed, the installation considers them as permeable conditions shaped by time, memory and power. The work asks not only what is contained or lost, but what endures in the material and in the gaze, what remains in the traces left behind beyond the borders, even as forms shift and settle
Amphoras are approached both as vessels and as archaeological artefacts shaped by ancient and colonial trade routes. Designed to separate inside from outside, they appear here altered and unstable, their forms disrupted. Positioned facing one another, they establish a relational space rather than a fixed boundary. Between them, a frame holds a mirror placed slightly outside its own limits. The viewer’s reflection never fully aligns, unsettling distinctions between observer and object, interior and exterior.
Across different myths and symbolic traditions, the poppy appears at thresholds: between sleep and waking, life and death, dream and reality. Covered in black clay, organic material burns within during firing. The interior is not revealed but transformed, leaving residue, ash, and trace. The flower becomes a material figure of suspension, holding multiple meanings without resolving them.
Rather than treating borders as lines to be crossed, the installation considers them as permeable conditions shaped by time, memory and power. The work asks not only what is contained or lost, but what endures in the material and in the gaze, what remains in the traces left behind beyond the borders, even as forms shift and settle
Biography
Görkem Gölbasi
Görkem Gölbasi is a researcher and visual artist, born in Istanbul, Turkey, and currently based in Berlin.
With a background in social sciences and critical research, she works with ceramics and installation to explore questions of time, memory, and the evolving narratives of modernity. Drawing on traditional ceramic forms, she transforms and distorts them to reveal social and historical structures.
She founded Studio Cinque Cheri as a space that bridges ceramic practice and artistic research.
With a background in social sciences and critical research, she works with ceramics and installation to explore questions of time, memory, and the evolving narratives of modernity. Drawing on traditional ceramic forms, she transforms and distorts them to reveal social and historical structures.
She founded Studio Cinque Cheri as a space that bridges ceramic practice and artistic research.
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