Olgu Sümengen Berker at Galeri Soyut, Ankara: Eve Dönüş and the Ceramic Diary of Home

What does “home” look like when you have lived away from it for years? For Olgu Sümengen Berker, the answer is made of clay: a female figure in porcelain, glowing faintly from inside, its skin printed with a map, a photograph from a morning walk, a line of handwriting. Olgu Sümengen Berker’s “Eve Dönüş” (Homecoming) at Galeri Soyut in Ankara, on view until 11 November 2026, is a short but concentrated exhibition that rewards slow looking.

An academic ceramist between three countries

Born in Isparta in 1978, Sümengen Berker trained in ceramics at Anadolu University (BFA and MA) and completed the doctorate-level proficiency in art (sanatta yeterlik) at Hacettepe University. She taught at Afyon Kocatepe University and then for thirteen years at Çankaya University in Ankara, becoming an associate professor in 2017. Today she teaches ceramics at the NATO Joint Force Command arts and crafts centre in Brunssum, in the Netherlands, and works from her own studio across the border in Gangelt, Germany. She is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, has taken part in more than eighty group exhibitions, and her honours include a gold plaque at MIKS in Croatia (2021).

That biography matters, because distance is the subject. “Eve Dönüş” follows her 2024 Galeri Soyut exhibition “Uzakta Evde / Away Back Home”; the two titles read like a call and response.

From mother goddess to self-portrait

The starting point is one of the oldest images in Anatolia: the seated or standing mother-goddess figure known from prehistoric sites across the region. Sümengen Berker does not reproduce it. She transforms it into a contemporary, personal image of the female body — less a deity than a woman carrying her own history. The gallery’s text links the figures to home, homeland, belonging and the elusive feeling of being “at home” somewhere.

Surfaces as pages

The technical vocabulary is rich. The fourteen works combine hand-built and wheel-thrown stoneware and porcelain, including paper porcelain and black porcelain. Surfaces are built up through slips, glazes, gold lustre, decals and transfer prints. Photographs of nature and her surroundings, taken on daily walks, travel-route maps and short handwritten notes are transferred onto the clay, turning each figure into a document.

The titles make the conceit explicit: many works are named as diary pages — Sayfa 4, Sayfa 17, Altın Sayfa 4 (“Golden Page 4”). Sayfa 17 is made in Limoges porcelain, left unglazed and repaired with kintsugi, the Japanese technique of mending breaks with gold — an apt emblem for an exhibition about fracture and return. Some porcelain figures are lit internally with LEDs, so that translucency becomes part of the image: the body as something that holds light.

Other pieces, such as Geçmiş 1–2 (“Past 1–2”, 2026, stoneware with transfers), look back explicitly to earlier work, while İç Işık (“Inner Light”, 2025) distils the luminous porcelain idea into a single compact form. The works on view date from 2021 to 2026, giving a sense of how the series has developed.

Galeri Soyut and ceramics in Ankara

Galeri Soyut in Çankaya’s Yıldızevler district runs several rooms simultaneously, and “Eve Dönüş” occupies its B Salon alongside painting exhibitions. That a commercial gallery gives a full solo show to ceramic sculpture is notable; Ankara has a strong academic ceramics tradition, much of it nurtured in university departments where Sümengen Berker herself taught. For visitors who cannot travel, the gallery offers a 3D virtual tour of the exhibition on its website.

Why it matters

For collectors, ceramic sculpture remains one of the most accessible entry points into serious contemporary practice in Türkiye, and the gallery lists the works here for sale at between 30,000 and 65,000 Turkish lira. For makers, the show is a masterclass in layered surface: how decal, lustre and transfer can carry narrative without overwhelming form. And for anyone who has lived between countries, the figures speak a familiar language.

Visiting information

Galeri Soyut, Şehit Mustafa Doğan Caddesi No:26/A, Yıldızevler, Çankaya, Ankara. 30 October – 11 November 2026. Open Monday–Saturday 10:00–19:00, closed Sunday; the gallery recommends booking. Phone +90 532 550 99 94 or +90 532 349 62 66; [email protected]. See our Olgu Sümengen Berker exhibition listing, the official exhibition page and more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.