Names that are myth and fairytale to the rest of the world are history in Turkey, a land that has been woven and unwoven time and again, like Penelope’s tapestry: Pergamon and Ephesus, the lost empire of Hattuşa, the 10,000-year-old temples of Göbeklitepe. Troy is still burning, half-buried under the Aegean sun and inside the ancient healing compound of Aeschlepion, doctors still seem to be whispering therapeutic nothings into the ears of their sleeping patients.
Even Istanbul’s 500-year-old Grand Bazaar is echoing down the years. Like Arman Suciyan, whose skills and knowledge are carrying the 500-year-old Kapalıçarşi goldsmithing tradition into the future, Dragonknot is a bridge connecting the ancient with the avant-garde, the abstract with the figurative, and the masculine with the feminine. The collection excavates and recrafts an imperial past: Inspired by the image of a pair of 3rd century BC Chinese repoussé silver belt buckles found in a yellowing auction house catalog, it speaks to the passage of time and the hand-making, artistry and materiality that bridge the centuries. A collection of deeply textural artifacts shaped by the lost-wax technique, Dragonknot is an archaeology of form that tells a story both ancient and modern while suggesting that history may simply be a series of events sculpted in the present.