Name: Sözsüz Hikaye: The Kilim Speaks
Start: 2025-08-09T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-08-09T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Sözsüz Hikaye: The Kilim Speaks

Mapped location of Sözsüz Hikaye: The Kilim Speaks

Goldmark Cultural Center 14001 Goldmark Dr Dallas, TX 75240

(214) 384-0021

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6:00 PM –8:00 PM

The Goldmark Cultural Center’s Norman Brown Gallery presents “Sözsüz Hikaye: The Kilim Speaks”, a solo exhibition of new fiber and ceramic works by Ukrainian artist Vasfie Abderafi, based on traditional Crimean Tatar cultural themes and Turkish kilim-rug textile designs.

The exhibition is on display from Monday August 4, 2025 through Friday August 29, 2025, with an opening reception on Saturday August 9, 2025 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm at the Norman Brown Gallery (14001 Goldmark Drive), plus an artist talk at 7:15pm that evening. The reception is an ideal time to meet the artist and learn from her about her work.

About the Exhibition

This work emerges from a deep well of ancestral memory - rooted in the Crimean Tatar heritage of Crimea, Ukraine.

Artist Vasfie Abderafi's practice is an act of cultural revival and resistance: a way to honor her lineage and give voice to a tradition nearly silenced by exile and erasure.

Using sgraffito, traditional patterns (Örnek), and hand-built clay forms, Abderafi creates to remember and preserve.

Each piece is a quiet actof devotion - a meditative ritual, a dialogue with the past, and an offering to the future.

The clay holds everything: the pain of displacement, the beauty of survival, and the unbreakable threads of identity.

This exhibition is a visual story woven in silence - a space where tradition, memory, and identity are threaded into ceramic form. Like a Kilim, the ancestral woven carpet, each piece invites the viewer to listen with the eyes and feel with the heart, as clay becomes a vessel for what cannot be spoken aloud.

Throughout the work, symbolic motifs emerge - not as decoration, but as carriers of ancestral knowledge, spiritual guardians, and memory keepers. Each line, texture, and symbol speaks of masculinity and femininity, fertility and resilience, and a sacred connection to land, lineage, and spirit. Together they form a visual language passed down through generations - a silent prayer for survival, healing, and continuity.

Let the Kilim speak - where words fall away, form remains.