"Eşik / Threshold'' (back side), punch needle embroidery on unbleached cotton fabric, 150 x 200 cm, edition 1/1, 2025. 4.5. Antalya Architecture Biennial, Antalya Battery Factory, Photo: Kaan Güneri
Threshold is a large-scale punch embroidery work that reads the continuous flow of modern urban life through a cross-section severed by a sharp intervention. Rendered in isometric perspective, the composition begins with a detailed, layered cityscape representing the rhythm of ordinary life. However, this living texture is abruptly bisected by a sharp line, beyond which architectural forms lose their definition, dissolving into horizontal threads and abstract lines.
The use of punch embroidery reinforces the work's conceptual framework through its materiality. This repetitive, labor-intensive craft reproduces the states of deceleration and endurance experienced during a moment of collective trauma. Each loop stitched into the fabric serves not only to construct a form but acts as a concrete trace, a tactile record keeping the time of that specific process.
The inherent double-sided nature of the technique allows the work to be read from two opposing fronts. While the obverse displays a defined and legible urban order, the reverse reveals the unseen irregularities, accidental knots, and suppressed layers of the construction. This duality offers the viewer two distinct narrative planes: the visible surface of reality and the chaotic undercurrents of memory.
Conceptually, Threshold embodies the state of being suspended in an indeterminate moment—neither fully returned to the past nor completely adapted to the new reality. This image of a city, half-built and half-unraveled, stands not merely as an urban landscape, but as a tactile archive of a collective rupture and a transitionary state preserved in fiber.
