Installation Distant Voices, Still Lives 12 framed embroidery works and a sound piece (35’’) commissioned by 5th Coventry Biennial and supported by SAHA. 2025
Text by Mine Kaplangı:
In the proposed exhibition Distant Voices, Still Lives, Mustafa Boga presents an intimate yet critically engaged exploration of memory, identity, and queer temporality through the lens of a self-described queer media archaeologist. The title, which also appears in Terence Davies’ celebrated film, is used here as an evocation of echo, stillness, and lived experience, framing Boga’s meditation on the interplay between frozen images and the life that once surrounded them.
“Distant Voices” signals the resonance of family, memory, and queer identity as they travel across time and space, particularly within non-Western and non-institutional histories. “Still Lives” speaks to Boga’s embroidered screenshots, each a frozen frame that nonetheless vibrates with the quiet vitality of memory, ritual, camp, and the subtle gestures that shape the everyday.
Utilising time as a queer methodology, Boga works within the currents of recollection embedded in daily life. His practice draws from an extensive family archive, including photographs and homemade VHS recordings, especially of celebratory gatherings in the Çukurova[1] region of southern Turkey. This is both a personal and a political gesture of collecting, preserving, and reinterpreting, in which the private sphere becomes a site of shared cultural and historical meaning.
A significant moment in Boga’s practice occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he began working primarily with free-hand machine embroidery. This shift extends his temporal investigations into a tactile, material register, combining traditional craft with contemporary artistic meditations. The embroidery functions as an embodied method of archiving, transforming ephemeral VHS stills into enduring physical artefacts that invite sustained, intimate engagement while remaining open to collective interpretation.
The exhibition centres on stills from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, drawn largely from family and their circle’s wedding videos. Each screenshot is chosen for its compositional qualities as well as the temporal traces inherent to VHS technology. These images are accompanied by background sound from wedding celebrations, treated as archival material in their own right. This sonic element animates the stills, establishing a dialogue between the visual stasis of the image and the movement, rhythm, and unpredictability of sound. Together, they invite viewers to reconstruct, imagine, or re-enter the elusive atmosphere of these events, linking visual and auditory memory in a fluid, non-linear way.
Within these compositions, the camp aesthetics of the era’s clothing and decorations merge with the ordinariness of everyday life, revealing strata of meaning often overlooked in formal archives. By queering these images, Boga reframes questions of archival value, bringing the personal, the regional, and the daily into the space of cultural legacy.
The digitisation of the archive, undertaken in collaboration with family members still living in Çukurova, reinforces the project’s emphasis on shared authorship and intergenerational exchange. The resulting works are at once records and re-imaginings, not nostalgic returns but active processes of re-seeing and reclaiming moments that were previously unspoken or unseen.
Through Distant Voices, Still Lives, Boga offers a layered and sensorial meditation on how we remember, how we collect, and how queer narratives inhabit personal time. The work invites the past to be experienced as both fixed and in motion, still yet alive.
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Mine Kaplangı (they/them) is an independent curator, producer, and art mediator from Istanbul, Turkey, currently based in London. They co-founded the initiatives Collective Çukurcuma (2015) and KUTULU (2021), and are presently co-curating the Entanglements of the Apocalypse programme at VSSL Studio (London). With Collective Çukurcuma, they have curated exhibitions, public programmes, and transdisciplinary reading group events since 2016. Their ongoing research explores queer/trans imaginaries of the apocalypse through the concept of a pirate radio, and they actively contribute to the research of the Carefuffle Working Group.
[1] Çukurova is a large fertile plain in the Cilicia region of southern Turkey, covering the easternmost areas of Mersin Province, southern and central Adana Province, western Osmaniye Province, and northwestern Hatay Province.
© 2025 by Mustafa Boga