We Who Have Known Many Shores brings together material practices rooted in Anatolian textiles, ceramics, and marbling, with contemporary mediums, to forge new directions for considering diasporic relationships to place and belonging. Conjuring earth, air, water, fire, and spirit, transdisciplinary artist Alize Zorlutuna collages mediums, methods, and geographies at the Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB) for their first solo exhibition in a public art gallery.

Exploring ancestral material practices through contemporary means, Zorlutuna reconnects threads that have been severed through displacement, imagining what healing might look like for those who have been separated from their homelands. Their approach emerges from years of research, training, and practice engaging with material and cultural technologies from the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa) while thinking through relationships to place, settler-colonialism, diaspora, and healing. Following generations of makers, Zorlutuna traces the ornament of past and creation of the present. They repeat patterns and actions known to many hands—the marbling of Ebru, the tufting of carpets, the coiling of ceramic vessels, the dying of silks; their hands hold deeply embodied knowledge and wisdom acquired through repeated engagement with traditional craft practices and a collaboration with the elements.

We Who Have Known Many Shores addresses diasporic relationships to land and water by tracing the outlines of waterways that have informed Zorlutuna’s sense of home. Using fabric, seeds, and video, they trace the contours of Lake Ontario’s shores, bends in the Humber River, and key waterways in Anatolia – the continental boundary of the Bosporus Strait, and the Marmara, Aegean, and Mediterranean seas. Incorporating healing plants from Anatolia and Turtle Island, as well as inviting the elements of wind and water into the exhibition, Zorlutuna explores the emotional landscape of belonging to place.

We Who Have Known Many Shores is a constellation of gestures, that together form a portal, inviting us to reach back to another time and place caught in the body’s memory to begin healing our collective futures.