Ayse Ipekdokuyan

Rakı Masası (Rakı Table)

Rakı Table as a Heterotopia. This installation of six wooden panels explores family as a site of absence, ritual, and fractured belonging. Each panel — titled as an "act" — functions as both painting and table surface, mimicking the furniture around which family gathers and falls apart.The rakı table is its stage: a ritual of togetherness that simultaneously numbs, isolates, and distorts. Turkish iconography — rakı, blue tiles, saz, küfe — roots the work in a specific cultural inheritance while opening onto broader questions of memory and identity. Raw wood is left exposed, filled with drawing and transferred imagery, then built up selectively with oil paint — not to resolve, but to mark boundaries and hold tension. The drawn passages carry my reality; the transfers carry the world as it exists without me.Moving through the six acts, you enter a space that is real, abstract, and surreal at once — a heterotopia where isolation is not solitary but shared, where presence and absence coexist without resolution.

“In a world where isolation is a shared act.”