The Woolf Arts Archive is delighted to speak with independent artist and curator Can Akgümüş, one of its founding members, as he prepares to begin a new chapter of his artistic life in the United Kingdom, having been granted a UK Global Talent visa under the Exceptional Talent route in the field of visual arts. In this conversation, we look back at the works, readings, exhibitions and shared projects that have brought his visual practice into dialogue with Virginia Woolf, while also considering how a practice shaped by Turkey’s cultural and historical landscape might continue to evolve in the United Kingdom.

Mine Özyurt Kılıç: Our conversations and collaborations have taken many forms over the years, from my reading of Great Dream in “Kutudaki Zaman ve Varolma Anları” ("Time in a Box and Moments of Being") to our Dalloway Days in Turkey, The Age of Fire and, eventually, our work together as founding members of the Woolf Arts Archive. Throughout these encounters, I have been struck by the way your work moves between personal and collective memory, between what the photograph records and what the artist later recovers, alters or reconstructs.

When I first encountered your pinhole works, I thought of them as records of what I would call ‘moments of becoming’: images formed through duration rather than by capturing a single, fixed instant. This reminded me of Woolf’s treatment of writing as a living and changing medium, as she moved between and often merged different literary forms. I see a similar impulse in your movement between pinhole photography, collage, scanning and installation. When did photography become for you not simply a means of recording the visible, but a material through which to think? Do these different techniques enable you to approach forms of life, time and memory that no single medium could fully contain?

Can Akgümüş: Before being recognized as art, photography behaved as an imitation of reality. The impulse to record, preserve, and accumulate what we see exactly as it is continually seduces our minds. In the background, this urge operates in tandem with the desire to possess, to capture, or, if it doesn’t sound too harsh, to conquer. When we deconstruct the definition in this way, the trick is revealed: Photography makes us believe a lie, tricking us into thinking that we have captured and can now preserve the very things we will, in truth, never be able to possess. This human blunder, this weakness behind the magic, is what interests me deeply. It is precisely from this point of departure that I build a conceptual ground when working with the photographic medium. ‘Recording the visible’ inherently harbors a paradox. And art breeds exactly from this dark void.

I believe the ‘moments of becoming’ you mention are intimately tied to the very nature of the image itself. As pictures and signs transform into records, memories, and the past, the space they occupy and the emotion they anchor to in each distinct mind can only be as unique, and yet as alike, as our fingerprints. What I mean is, a fingerprint is just a fingerprint; a photograph is just a photograph. By definition, a photograph of a turbulent sea is a visual that fires up in all our minds almost instantaneously. Yet, what truly elevates it into an image lies in the chemical synthesis of these visuals with memories, scents, and the layered depths of our memory. It is only then that a photograph of a wave signifies so much more. And perhaps, it is only then that we might have the opportunity to capture and hold onto the moment of becoming.

I believe that the fact our ‘conversations and collaborations have taken many forms over the years’ is perhaps a shared witnessing of these very moments of becoming. This mutual knowing, this coming together ring by ring, and this advancing by continually expanding the circle can only truly flourish within the shared atmosphere of literary and artistic conditions.

Just as our lives grow layer upon layer, like linens draped over one another as they pass through time, transforming and shifting in form, the language and style we use to convey these ‘moments of becoming’ also evolve and diversify. Photography has always been a material for me. The mechanism of curiosity and experimentation, the one that determines what I will do with this material, how I will do it, which molten metal I will pour to cast the key to my visual language, and which door I will force open with it, has constantly changed over time. But I have always proceeded by backstitching; as the seam advances, I have always strived to move forward by looping back through the previous point, ensuring it holds strong. For this reason, although I have experimented with numerous methods, I have essentially wandered around, through, in front of, and behind doors and thresholds without ever taking my eyes off the two great guardians: Memory and Time.

Mine Özyurt Kılıç: Virginia Woolf has accompanied several stages of your artistic and curatorial journey. Do you remember your first encounter with her writing? What was it in Woolf’s language or imagination that first entered your visual world?

Can Akgümüş: Unlike many, my first encounter with Woolf was through her only posthumously published collection, originally titled “Haunted House and Other Short Stories”, which was brought into Turkish through Alev Bulut’s invaluable translation as “Monday or Tuesday”. Consequently, the image of her that took root in my mind was quite distinct from the one most people hold. She entered my consciousness, and firmly settled there, as a woman sitting in her chair by the fireplace at her country home (Monk’s House), hearing the sounds of bombs falling (on London during the world war); a woman who, while gazing at a mark on the wall and pondering whether it was a hole or a paint stain left from last summer, guided us through possibilities and things already come to pass with her drifting stream of consciousness. She was like a sorceress, waking me from a dream with a remarkably calm voice, simply saying: “The mark on the wall? It was a snail.”

In essence, it is exactly this tension: the tension between what is taking place and what has been concluded, between the visible and what resides behind it, between the mind and reality. This very aspect of Woolf, I believe, has profoundly nourished the main arteries of my creative production.

Mine Özyurt Kılıç: Our paths first crossed through The Waves, in a seminar where I read the opening of Woolf’s novel alongside your The Garden of Forgetting Series. I later wrote about the text and image as forming a kind of diptych, both shaped by the rhythms of memory, consciousness and retrospection. What did you discover in that first encounter between Woolf’s words and your image? What has it meant to see this dialogue enter The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Transnational Perspectives and reach readers beyond the moment and place in which it began?

Can Akgümüş: Woolf’s The Waves begins with an exquisite opening scene. Setting the rhythm for the stream of thought that will unfold across its pages, it bends time and space, inviting us into the dynamic backstage of existence and becoming, opening with the sunrise, which is the birth of time itself. In my own practice, I am deeply interested in the peculiar and bittersweet nature of the images etched into our memory. We might call this the ‘diagram’ behind the visuals; it is akin to the exploration of a space operating in the background, entirely independent of time and space.

This diptych reading and our encounter create a sanctuary, a special zone that stands outside the ambitious, aggressively ‘severing’ rhythm of today’s world. The collision of image and word within this private space is like a symphony of sound and vision. In this diptych convergence, I felt as though I was witnessing a contemporary moment of being, uniting with a single spark from a colossal legacy. And, as with every profound encounter, the parallel diptych reading you performed in response to it transformed into a magical gaze within The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Transnational Perspectives. This unique, intermedial, and interdisciplinary space turns into an echoing realm of creativity, one that reaches the readers and continuously births new reproductions.

Mine Özyurt Kılıç: Our collaboration continued within the framework of the Virginia Woolf Studies in Turkey event series, with a seminar at Pera Museum, a translation workshop and plans for an art exhibition. In your own curatorial practice, you later brought together a range of artists for a Woolf, Joyce and Eliot inspired exhibition entitled Homecoming, within "The Hundred Years of Modernism" celebration program, and then fifteen artists in The Searchlight, an exhibition inspired by Woolf’s short story of the same name. I wonder what drew you to this particular story, with its movement across darkness, distance and time? How did you create a shared curatorial space in which the artists could respond to the story without merely illustrating it?

Can Akgümüş: Woolf’s “The Searchlight” harbors a highly distinct narrative built upon time, memory, human relations, and moments of epiphany. Guided by this text, which entirely transforms and deepens our gaze toward the sky and our own generation, I endeavored to present a contemporary selection in pursuit of light. It was a progression through a text that offered a look at my own generation while simultaneously incorporating their gaze.

The exhibition opened with Can İncekara’s delicately executed watercolor painting. In this piece titled “Galileo’s Telescope”, we see a very specific, double-tubed telescope, precisely like the one that materialized in Woolf’s mind: a magical device where looking through one end reveals the stars, and looking through the other allows us to observe our future and past, our generation, our traces on earth, and our flickering presence in the dark.

The artwork itself actually functions exactly like this device. In contemporary art practices, as long as it can collide with words, thoughts, and the benevolent and demonic aspects of today’s human character, it grants us an entirely new perspective. When collaborating with artists, the approach that inspires me most is accurately transmitting and signaling these flickering lights within the dialogue we build. If we catch the right frequency, we become like searchlights communicating in a dark universe. We position ourselves around larger lighthouses and transform into a part of a vast network, one that blinks at one another, sends signals, and illuminates the path.

Mine Özyurt Kılıç: You have been part of the Woolf Arts Archive from the beginning, not just as a founding member but also as an artist. What does an archive like this mean to you as an artist, particularly one that preserves Woolf’s legacy while tracing the art her work continues to inspire? What can such an archive make possible for artists today?

Can Akgümüş: As one follows in Woolf’s footsteps, stepping in and out of the rooms that open into the space she created, one deeply understands how vibrant and encompassing this word-built creation truly is, and how its power spreads wave after wave with a rhythm that transcends borders and languages. A living archive, stationed within the halo of an artist and on the periphery of her light, forms new main arteries from which creativity can draw nourishment. It becomes an inspiration for artists working across vastly different disciplines, as well as for academics, readers, and future generations. To weave new networks, to send signals to other lights and ignite dialogues, to be carried wave upon wave across this boundless sea, and to unite with lighthouses in order to forge new paths for one another, a living archive provides a solid foundation for us all.

Mine Özyurt Kılıç: Looking through the Woolf Arts Archive as an artist, if you were to pick one item that particularly catches your eye, which one would it be, and why?

Can Akgümüş: I would choose La Sœur de Shakespeare*.

This play has a profound connection to the two great guardians at the heart of our conversation: Memory and Time. Inspired by Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), it places Judith, the gifted and courageous sister Woolf imagined for William Shakespeare on stage, where her creative life is stifled by the constraints of her time.

Yet, what truly draws me to this work is the merging of Judith and Virginia on stage, how they echo through one another. Much like the ‘searchlights communicating in a dark universe’ I mentioned earlier, their voices, spanning across centuries, intertwine like whispers in the dark.

When walking across the Millennium Bridge in London with St. Paul’s behind me, I always tear my eyes away from the colossal presence of the Tate Modern that dominates the landscape, turning my gaze instead to the Globe, which gleams like a pearl with its unique structure. Shakespeare’s Globe! Every time I look at it, I find myself thinking of Judith alongside the presence of Shakespeare. Perhaps my feet simply got tangled in this recent reverie, and that is why I chose this remarkable play, along with its exquisite visual!

Mine Özyurt Kılıç: Can, thank you for this generous conversation, for your contribution to the Woolf Arts Archive, and for all that has grown, wave after wave, from our first meeting through The Waves. As you prepare to continue your artistic practice in the United Kingdom, we look forward to seeing how these circles continue to widen, what new images they gather, and where they carry you, and all of us, next.

*You can also read an entry about La Sœur de Shakespeare on the WAA blog.

*Can Akgümüş approaches photography as an artistic medium through which he explores the relationship between visual reality, its reproduction, and the interconnected concepts of memory, history, and society. Experimenting with techniques such as collage, exposure, and scanning, he challenges the conventional boundaries of photography and develops new forms of image-making. His artistic practice reflects on memory, the processes of remembering and forgetting, the cycles of life, and their influence on individuals, while also examining the connections between personal and collective memory.