ARTnews

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In a 2020 interview with the website border_less, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan once referred to carpeting as something which “serves as a border and separator between us and the coldness of the earth.” No surprise, then, that she has grown interested in what lies beneath our feet—in particular the layers of history encased deep in the ground. For her installation Nothing Further Beyond (2021), Büyüktaşçıyan offers up cleanly sliced pieces of carpet layered atop one another. Some appear to bend ever so slightly; others are lightly singed with clean lines. Büyüktaşçıyan’s point of inquiry for this work was the ruins of the Arch of Theodosius in her home city of Istanbul. For ancient Romans, the arch would have been seen as a reference to the mythical Pillars of Hercules, which marked the borders of Western civilization and were emblazoned with the Latin for “Nothing Further Beyond.” Consider Büyüktaşçıyan’s displaced carpets as a means to suggest that borders such as that one are merely fictional.