At the End of Looking, at the Beginning of Possibilities by Sinan Eren Erk
Artistic processes are often associated with solitude and introspection. Yet when we encounter a work of art, we tend to think not about how it came into being, but about its “finished” state, rarely questioning the process behind it. We enter into a brief dialogue with the work before us— one oriented less toward understanding than toward looking—much as we have grown accustomed to doing within contemporary societies shaped by an economy of speed, swiftly shifting our attention to whatever comes next.
Solo exhibitions, however, allow us to step outside this velocity, offering the opportunity to spend time examining and experiencing an artist’s practice. As time begins to unfold the works in an exhibition like a folded sheet of paper, complex emotions, otherwise inexpressible feelings, ideological or political discourses, vulnerabilities, resistance, and countless other abstract notions become visible. The reality of the artist we thought we had only just come to know—their past, present, state of mind, process of making, and the possible paths their practice may take in the future—gradually comes into view, allowing us to begin understanding them through their work. By considering an artist’s voice as a whole across different works, perspectives, and states of mind, a solo exhibition invites us to reflect on their reality and to trace the questions that make their practice possible.
This is equally true of Mustafa Boğa’s work. His works first draw the viewer in through technique. Although he has employed different methods over time, at the foundation of his visual language lies embroidery—a technique physically grounded in the cyclical movement of the sewing machine. Boğa, however, approaches embroidery with a painterly sensitivity, using it to build the slow, abstract accumulation of a mental process. It is a practice that demands patience and cannot emerge through arbitrary gestures, yet remains open to chance, the unplanned, and “accidents.” Like the fabric upon which it is worked, the process itself is flexible and fluid.
Yet these vividly coloured embroideries are not merely images striving for beauty, nor simply “landscapes” populated by human and human-like figures. At times approaching photorealism, this striking visual language moves beyond popular concerns to reveal traces of a more inward and personal inquiry into life—one that is nevertheless deeply familiar to us all. The artist’s new exhibition, *This Might Be the Last Thing You Are Looking At*, places the notion of the “end”— something each of us inevitably contemplates at some point in our lives—alongside the possibility of a new beginning, removing it from an exclusively dark or melancholic context.
Beginnings often promise excitement. They herald favourable possibilities ahead, good things yet to come, a past we are relieved to leave behind, and a new step in which anything might be possible. Even in our darkest moments, it is often the hope of a new beginning that keeps us going. We long for another chance and imagine that this time we might do everything better. To begin is to bring what came before to an end—or, at the very least, to take a step towards doing so.
But beginnings also contain unease. The things we have long spoken about from a distance can suddenly provoke immense anxiety when the moment arrives to take the first step, even when we are certain of what we want to do and how we intend to do it. Anxiety is perhaps the moment at which we come closest to an ending in which everything might fall apart. The infinite universe of possibilities that constitutes the future begins to narrow with that very first step. The first step breaks the spell: it takes control out of our hands and leaves us alone with ourselves, our predictions, our prejudices and, more importantly, reality itself. Perhaps this is why every beginning also contains the possibility of an end.
*This Might Be the Last Thing You Are Looking At* does not simply reveal what the artist is doing today; it also contains numerous references to his earlier works. Having long explored the concept of memory and the ways in which lived experience becomes inscribed upon the mind, Boğa increasingly brings the act of remembering together with explicit and implicit symbols from his own past and fragments of everyday life encountered everywhere. Embroidery becomes, on the
one hand, a kind of therapist’s couch and, on the other, transforms him into a storyteller at the loom, transmitting the image itself.
In earlier works, for instance, the repetitive language through which he constructed a narrative around the orange—an image closely associated with Adana—has taken on different forms across different periods, becoming one of the fundamental elements of his practice. In this exhibition, this mode of remembering opens onto another time through the carpet. Motifs rooted in childhood and nourished by images belonging to that period return to the earliest layers of personal memory while simultaneously reconstructing the past within the present. The past thus becomes something unchangeable, accepted, even narrated—frozen in the moment almost like a photograph. In doing so, the artist lays before the viewer, with remarkable openness, a summary of his memory extending from past to present.
For precisely this reason, he presents the viewer with a puzzle to be deciphered by bringing together the symbols embedded within each work. As viewers attempt to solve this familiar yet deeply personal puzzle, they begin to remember not only fragments of the artist’s past, but pieces of their own lives as well.
Boğa conceals the clues to this puzzle sometimes in sentences, sometimes in forms patiently worked into being, and sometimes in references to his own past. Just as his embroideries can initially be mistaken for photographs, the first impression created by the works is deliberately deceptive. Yet as we lose ourselves among threads, fabrics, stitches, found objects and neon, traces of a life lived against the current begin to emerge. The closer the viewer comes to the artist, the more they begin to untie, with their own hands, the knots he has left within the works.
Each of these works can also be understood as a way for the artist to turn inward. Slowly emerging as he withdraws into his own reality and works, patiently brought into being, they eventually appear before him as messengers of himself. In one of the exhibition’s largest sculptures, toy babies appear almost as though they have been shaped by the identity of the family into which they were born, “resembling the material from which they themselves are made.” In this sense, they resemble ghosts of the past.
Symbols of lives that have only just begun, the babies, despite all their vitality, confront us encased within a hard, rigid layer. These transparent, intertwined and solidified bodies carry traces of other bodies, other times, and other possibilities that once existed. Their limbs reach outward from the yellow mass as though asking for help; their damage, unsettling beauty, and vacant, uncanny gazes transform what remains of these toys into a heap calling out to the viewer from the darkness of memory. They are ghosts of the past—or perhaps the last things we see. They seem suspended between possibility and the transience of time, embodying both beginning and end. As each image and symbol enters into dialogue with the others, it leads the artist towards another inward discovery.
As with the toy babies, similar themes emerge in works where figures appear, whether abstractly or concretely, particularly through hands and feet. Boğa distorts hands and feet, disrupting reality and constructing a visual world through the emotional states he perceives. Hands and feet are the “active” parts of the body. The artist treats these limbs as fragments possessing memories of their own. Each produces differently, thinks differently, and remembers differently. They are the limbs that perform actions; that materialise the creative process by using tools—by writing, drawing, or operating a sewing machine, for instance; that walk and move from one place to another; that bear the vital weight of the body; and that sometimes defend it against threats, resist, or attack what stands before them. They are the apparent agents of our actions.
Perhaps this is precisely why the faces of the artist’s figures become slightly abstracted, blurred, and anonymous. Mustafa Boğa seems to be attempting to separate identity from the individual— to look at reality not through particular people, but through the values and ideas they represent. This is reinforced by the fact that none of the figures are given names. Neither the titles nor the captions of the works identify these human-like beings. While the artist invites us to associate them with things we recognise, he deliberately detaches them from the likenesses of specific individuals.
The figures therefore cease to belong solely to one person or a particular memory and become capable of touching everyone who encounters them in different ways. Through hands and feet, their gestures and positions, and the relationships they imply between people, we begin to recall moments from our own lives and search for their echoes in our past. Or, as we try to understand why an abstracted image has become blurred, the most indistinct moments of our dreams and fragments of memory on the verge of being forgotten resurface. Because sometimes these are precisely the last things we see and remember.
The process of accepting and confronting what we believe we have lost often begins with remembering. Like the movement of a sewing machine, we travel backwards and forwards through time, turning our gaze inward even as we look at the works.
This movement is also a reflection of the relationship of meaning the artist establishes with himself while constructing the exhibition. Look closely, and a tension emerges behind the emotions articulated through the visual language. Yet the artist has whispered this to us from the very beginning, through the sentence that forms the exhibition’s title: *This might be the last thing you are looking at.*
The harshness of the reality that confronts the viewer—the past, endings, the unreliable nature of memory, and the act of leaving things behind—is concealed behind the same illusion. Bright colours and vivid imagery are part of the artist’s deliberate guidance. Just as we attempt to erase life’s heaviest burdens, its saddest moments, or our deepest fears from our minds and replace them with something more beautiful, Boğa constructs his visual world through luminous, vibrant colour.
The materials he uses serve the same purpose in his hands. Fabric, like reality itself, bends and folds; at times it covers things over, concealing them and becoming a form of “camouflage.” Yet this camouflage works in both directions: over time, what conceals and what is concealed exchange places. Here, the question of what remains in our minds—of what the last thing we see might be—returns once more. Camouflage, after all, can be a means of leaving the past behind, of covering certain things over. And yet we know that what has been covered never disappears entirely. The past can resurface; for precisely this reason, the image we remember carries within it a sense of unease.
Despite everything, the title *This Might Be the Last Thing You Are Looking At* also carries the courage to keep going—to take another step despite the possibility of definitive endings. This motivation is reflected in the artist’s practice. Rather than settling into a static perfection that might provide a comfort zone, he chooses to search for different forms of meaning. As he experiments with new ways of telling his story, he accepts the possibility of falling, making mistakes, or failing.
This search for meaning prevents him from remaining confined to embroidery alone; at times it takes shape in a carpet, at others in a quilt, in neon, or in works composed of epoxy and found objects. A change in material does not mean a change in narrative. On the contrary, it allows the same memory to re-emerge across different surfaces. The image that gradually takes form, layer by layer, through embroidery becomes traces of childhood in the carpet, fragmented bodies in the sculpture, and a voluminous shell in the quilt that invites our touch. As the materials change, the surface of the narrative changes with them, while memory, the body, and the idea of the end remain constant beneath it all.
For me, the artist’s ability to take a new step while navigating his unease constitutes the most sincere, human, and courageous aspect of his expression. It is a mode of expression that does not deny the past, exhaustion, exclusion, or resentment; on the contrary, it uses them as leverage.
And so, as we reach the end of this text, let us return to its beginning: What would we want the last thing we see to be? What would we want to remember?
I believe the artist asks himself this question as well. But I do not believe he intends to find an answer. Because even as the question points us towards an ending, it simultaneously opens the door to a new beginning. Perhaps what remains for us to do is not to find the answer, but simply to continue on our way—without knowing what the future will bring, or exactly how much of the past will travel with us.
The person who knows this best is the one telling this story. Each time, the artist assumes another form and tells his story anew. He changes what we look at, what we remember, and perhaps the last thing we will ever see.
Again and again.
© 2026 by Mustafa Boga