"Eşik / Threshold'' (back side), punch needle embroidery on unbleached cotton fabric, 150 x 200 cm, edition 1/1, 2025. 4.5. Antalya Architecture Biennial, curated by Celal Abdi Güzer, Antalya Battery Factory, Photo: Kaan Güneri
Threshold is a large-scale punch embroidery work that reads the flow of modern urban life through a cross-section severed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Rendered in an isometric perspective, the composition visualizes this abrupt halt; architectural forms suddenly bisect, dissolving into abstract threads, marking a clear moment of rupture.
The use of this traditional, labor-intensive craft reinforces the work's conceptual foundation. The act of punch embroidery requires a repetitive, physical stitching process that reproduces the felt states of deceleration and endurance experienced during the pandemic's lockdowns. In this tactile archive, each individual loop acts as a tangible record—a unique somatic trace of that specific, collective time.
The work's inherent double-sided nature offers two opposing, yet interconnected narratives: the defined, legible order of the obverse, with its clear isometric logic, and the chaotic, messy, and hidden knots of the reverse. This intentional binary creates a visual dialogue between public perception and private, hidden realities, revealing the underlying tension of a society in isolation.
This duality embodies the collective state of being suspended in an indeterminate moment—neither fully returned to the past nor completely adapted to the new reality. Threshold stands not merely as an abstract urban landscape, but as an embodied tactile archive; a record of collective memory, preserving a specific rupture and a transitionary state of being within the fibers of a woven trace, monumentalizing the quiet labor of endurance.
The interior is rendered as an abstract blueprint. Capturing the sudden dislocation of the pandemic era—a domestic landscape floating on a previously unexperienced plane of reality.
In-progress view of the 'Threshold' installation. The image captures the manual transfer of the axonometric technical drawing onto the textile surface via the punch needle technique.
Decoupled documentation of the textile surfaces. The image highlights the structural duality of the punch needle technique: the graphic definition of the backing (left) contrasted with the tactile density of the looped surface (right). Photos: Kaan Güneri
Macro details of the front surface showing the volumetric loop pile texture. The monochromatic relief relies on the interplay of light and shadow to define the architectural geometry without chromatic contrast. Photos: Kaan Güneri
Macro detail of the reverse side (verso). Unlike the organized linearity of the front, this surface reveals the raw, irregular entanglement of loose threads and knots that constitute the structural foundation.