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Ev Yapımı – Hemlagat
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Gülbeden Kulbay

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Alby matcenter, Botkyrka 2023
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Ev Yapımı – Hemlagat is a video artwork in three parts that depicts food as a language of love. Just as the filling of the dish Mantı, where the wheat casing envelops the interior, generations of food traditions have also been carried in the hands of our elder women.

In the early 1960s, a large group of men from Kulu, Turkey, came to Sweden to work in factories across the country. Some of these men ended up in Botkyrka, including the artist’s grandfather Mehmet. After many years of solitude and work here, his wife Nazik and the children also arrived to start a shared life in Botkyrka. It became a place where many different cultural heritages merged, a place full of history and life. Through migration, food accompanied them as a living cultural heritage.

In the video artwork “Ev Yapımı – Hemlagat,” we follow the lengthy process required to prepare the dish mantı, which becomes the carrier of family relationships and traditions. It is a story of the crafted and edible artistry.

The artwork is part of the Art Collection of Botkyrka Municipality and was exhibited during the exhibition “Matters of the Heart – a Journey into the Art Collection,” which showcases Botkyrka Municipality’s art collection and presents art as we encounter it in everyday life.
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Gülbeden Kulbay is an interdisciplinary artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. With a prolific career spanning 19 years, her varied artistic practice includes performance, community-engaged art, and culinary actions. At the core of her work lie questions and explorations of the body; of presence and sensual experience; of connecting with other bodies, be they human or non-human. Connection, collaboration and negotiation in particular are fundamental to her practice, as she endeavours to illuminate the network of interrelations and interdependencies we are all enmeshed in – to show how we all need each other. In this sense, her works offer a critique of the capitalist mode of living and the sense of alienation from self and others it engenders. Kulbay’s work has been shown in Sweden, across Europe, and the USA, with pieces currently in the collections of Falun Kommun and Botkyrka Kommun.

Read more about Gülbeden Kulbay’s artistry here: https://gulbedenkulbay.com/

Photo of Gülbeden: Kegen Lorentzon
Text: Alexandra Papademetriou

Gülbeden Kulbay worked with a cultural heritage in Botkyrka municipality within the project eyelander.

See the artist talk here: https://youtu.be/gQDeEOM_QNo