Keloğlan, one of the most important characters of the Turkish folk-tale tradition, is interpreted in this sculpture as a character who perceives life as a game and, rather than giving in to anxiety in the face of problems, sets up his own game with his wits. Overcoming life’s hardships without letting them trouble him, through his practical intelligence and his own particular approach, Keloğlan becomes a symbol of grasping the world from a different point of view.
The patches on the sculpture’s costume refer to the character’s poverty, while the crackled grey and white tones on the ceramic surface express his innocence and fairy-tale identity. The texture of the material and the marks on the surface bring the figure’s characteristic features together with its formal expression.
In this interpretation Keloğlan is not merely a poor tale hero but a character who develops his own solutions to life’s difficulties and approaches events with a playful intelligence. The sculpture revisits the cultural memory carried by the traditional tale in the language of contemporary ceramic sculpture.
Passed down from generation to generation in Anatolia’s oral culture, folk tales are not merely fantastical stories; they carry a society’s fears, hopes, transformations and shared memory.
“The Memory of Tales” reinterprets characters such as Şahmaran, the Zümrüdüanka, Keloğlan, the giant, the giant’s mother, the sultan and the prince in the language of contemporary ceramic sculpture.
Shaped by hand, each figure goes beyond its appearance in the traditional tale and becomes an original work of art carrying its own symbolic meaning and story.