The Right to Color

Here, the material and the symbolic are not separated from one another. The physical properties of the pigment, the cultural meanings of color, and the symbolic value attributed to it by the artist meet on the same surface. In Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s Red / Red (2015) work, the red obtained from the “Ararat” or “Armenian cochineal” (Porphyrophora hamelii) insect is associated with the contested border geography that separates the two banks of the Aras River. The production knowledge of this red, which has been used for centuries in textiles, frescoes, and manuscripts, has been largely lost on the Turkish side since 1915. The pigment used in the project, meanwhile, is derived from ink reproduced by a researcher in Yerevan based on recipes found in fourteenth-century Armenian manuscripts. In this way, Çavuşoğlu places side by side the different histories that have developed on either side of a single color: on the Turkish side, the red of the Armenian cochineal has been replaced by the red of the Turkish flag, while on the Armenian side, this ecosystem is gradually disappearing. Here, color becomes both a material remnant and a political language read through borders, memory, and loss.

A similar relationship can also be seen in Al-Wah’at Collective’s Wild Hedges (2023), which could be seen in the exhibition Breaking Through a Dam[12] at SALT Beyoğlu in recent months. Tracing the circulation of prickly pear and scale bug between Palestine, Mexico, and Spain, the project considers the ecological history of these living beings together with colonialism, dispossession, and forms of other-than-human life. Its focus on the plant’s and insect’s different material uses in weaving, dyeing, printing, and food shows that pigment does not only produce a color; it also carries the soil, labor, and relations between different geographies. Otobong Nkanga’s practice, meanwhile, which traces the relationships between minerals, extraction, and labor, expands this line of inquiry: the material behind a color can point to a geological and political history far broader than the color we see on the surface.

On the other hand, the way color is experienced bodily and sensorially is as important as the material history of pigment. In Jeffrey Moore’s novel The Memory Artists (2001)[13], that I read with great pleasure years ago, the synesthetic character Noel Burun experiences words as colors and forms, which made me think about how memory can be formed not only through language, but also through relationships between the senses. Here, I choose to consider the novel not as scientific evidence, but as a literary example through which to think about the permeability of the boundaries between the senses. On the other hand, the relationships that the twentieth-century painter Wassily Kandinsky established between color, sound, and movement were groundbreaking. Kandinsky approached color not merely as an optical element, but as a multisensory experience connected to spiritual and auditory vibrations. Placing this intersensory approach alongside the material history of pigments brings together the bodily experience of a color and the history of the material that makes that color possible. Can a color be, at the same time, both the material result of a mineral, plant, or synthetic compound and an experience formed within the body, memory, and culture?

This question leads me to the ways color can carry personal and collective memory. How might it be possible to trace the memory of a place, or to keep someone else’s archive alive, through color? I think we can consider the recent work of artist Furkan Öztekin in this context. Since 2019, Öztekin[14] has been working with the archive of the deceased trans poet and activist Ceyhan Fırat. In the series Yepyeni Gözler (Brand New Eyes), he brings the accidental traces of color that form on the backs of photographs and sheets of paper back onto the surface using ink, acrylic, and charcoal.

At the center of these works is the expression “shabby pink,” which Fırat uses to describe the sky in her autobiographical book Bacak Böcek Oyunu (1996). Öztekin does not simply remember this color, but follows its trace through mixtures of ink, charcoal, and acrylic. The resulting stains become both a color investigation open to chance and an attempt to reconstruct something that is no longer present in the archive. In this way, color becomes less a means of representing the past than a way of relating to it, while “shabby pink” transforms from a memory into a tangible trace of a search for a shared language and memory.

The capacity of color to reconstruct an archive, trace a space that is disappearing, or preserve the memory of suppressed identities in this way also brings the political meanings of color into question. The strong relationship that purple has established with the feminist movement, or its uses in LGBTQ+ history, shows that a color can become a carrier of social struggles over time. Mor Çatı’s use of purple as one of the symbols of the feminist struggle in Turkey since 1990 reminds us that color can be not only an aesthetic or sensory experience, but also a space of collective political memory. At this point, the practice of artist Müge Yılmaz, whom I will discuss later and whose work is informed by feminist science fiction, opens up another line for thinking about these relationships between color, the body, identity, and belonging. I am adding new questions: Can a color recreate a personal archive just as much as it carries the history of a historical material? Can it preserve the traces of a place or an exiled identity? Can the meaning of a color change together with the experiences of the communities that use it?

These questions lead me, in the final section of the text, to the color turquoise. I think turquoise is a powerful example of how complex the relationship between color and material, material and geography, geography and language can be. While blue and the color of the sky were associated with sacred concepts such as eternity, the sky, and the east among the early Turks, the visual presence of blue-green tones is striking in the tiles of mosques, madrasas, and tombs during the Seljuk and Ottoman periods. The transportation of turquoise stones from Asia to Europe by Turkish merchants shows that this color and material have not only a cultural meaning, but also a history of circulation. Indeed, the name turquoise in European languages is thought to be connected to the stone reaching Europe through the geography of Turkey. Yet the geological origin of the stone and the geography indicated by the name given to it do not point to the same place. Here, the name may be recording not so much the origin of the material as the route through which Europe came to know it.

This distinction finds a strong counterpart in Amsterdam based artist Müge Yılmaz’s botanically focused personal story in her video work A Brief History of Naturalisation (2026).[15] Yılmaz places her own process of acquiring citizenship alongside the tulip’s migration to the Netherlands and its cultural adaptation there. In the video, where personal narrative, humor, and elements of science fiction are interwoven, plant-human hybrids establish a surreal connection between these two stories. The tent-like nomadic structures that create the atmosphere of the work also allow feelings of citizenship, belonging, being in between, and exclusion to be experienced spatially. Bringing the bureaucratic rituals of citizenship into confrontation with the idea of becoming a “citizen of the world,” the work sets the mobility of humans and plants against the fixity of national borders.

Müge’s intertwining of the tulip’s migration to the Netherlands with her own citizenship process shows how a botanical entity can be connected to politics of national identity and belonging. The movement of a plant from one geography to another is not simply the relocation of a species; it also means the creation of a new history around it, a new form of ownership, and a new narrative of belonging. When we think of the same thing in relation to turquoise, we can see that behind the appearance of a color as though it belongs to a national identity lies a much longer and more complex history of circulation.

As I focused on expression and relations of power through language, I am now questioning what I have been thinking about through pigment. Through what processes does it become possible for something to be named, put into circulation, made visible, or claimed as one’s own? When a pigment is extracted in one place and processed in another geography, is it only the pigment itself that moves, or does a history, a name, a memory, and a relation of power also move with it? Although this may sound rhetorical, I am actually asking this sincerely. How much does the name of a color change its history? When does a color become a cultural property? I think examples such as turquoise leave these questions open rather than providing definitive answers. The geological origin of the stone can be separated from the geography indicated by the name given to it. This requires us to trace the circulation of a color rather than fix its “origin.” In a sense, the name records not where the material came from, but the routes through which it became known.

At this point, it is possible to return to the question of “expression” with which I began. Expression can be thought of not only as something that takes place through language, but as a process that moves between materials, pigments, bodies, and the senses. In fact, language and pigment may be closer to one another than we think. After all, both name, classify, and put the world into circulation. Following the name of a color, in this sense, becomes a way of tracing a material and the history that moves along with it. In other words, the only question this text has really been concerned with is what a color carries with it when it moves. Because the story of pigment shows that color is never only on the surface. Color can be a carrier moving between material and memory, body and geography, trade and identity, expression and power.

This is precisely where the contribution of this research to curatorial practice lies: in bringing artistic research, material examination, and critical thinking together to develop a research method that can make overlooked material histories visible. We can approach pigments not only as subjects of art history or raw materials of artistic production, but as materials that carry ecological, social, societal, and political relations. In this way, a step can be taken toward considering how curatorial practice can contribute to rereading these histories and producing alternative narratives to dominant cultural classifications. Through this, curatorial practice can move beyond being merely a means of transmitting existing knowledge and become a form of research that produces new knowledge through the material itself.