.artSümer is proud to present Özge Topçu’s first solo exhibition at the gallery titled The Grace of Unknowing between January 31 – March 13, 2026.
The Grace of Unknowing invites a gentle contemplation of how ideologies of cultural origin emerge from mythology, geography, and historical narrative—not as fixed truths, but as fragile constellations shaped by what is remembered and what quietly slips away. The exhibition brings together Re-deciphered Scripts and Celestial Stalagmites to illuminate subtle, often suppressed connections between the Eastern Mediterranean and the formation of Western identity—threads that have been foundational yet quietly obscured from prevailing European histories.
Re-deciphered Scripts turns toward the Phoenician alphabet, among the earliest writing systems of the Mediterranean, whose quiet influence lingers beneath the brighter Hellenistic stories of origin. Shaped as terracotta vessels that evoke archaeological fragments, the work holds language as a tender material—marked by erasure, transmission, and gentle misattribution. Sound deepens this exploration, allowing writing to resonate as vibration rather than permanent mark, a fleeting echo in the vastness of time.
Celestial Stalagmites moves from script to ornament and myth. Drawing upon Iberian ceramic traditions quietly enriched by Islamic and North African geometries, the installation traces how visual languages, symbols, and cosmological motifs drift across regions, softly detaching from their origins like stalactites forming in unseen caverns.
Together, the works embrace origin as a luminous yet contested narrative, woven from migration, quiet appropriation, and selective remembrance. In surrendering the urge to fully know or reclaim, they reveal a deeper grace: the beauty of connections that persist in the half-light of unknowing, inviting us to dwell in resonance rather than resolution.
