SEEDS FOR A STORY: Derya Akay

In this artist book Derya Akay explores the slipperiness of language, identity, gender, food, and culture, through a kaleidoscope of images, layered together in a scrapbook-like style collection. Children's drawings, scribbles, textures, and textiles are gathered alongside detailed depictions of architecture, ornamentation, and flora and fauna from the southern Turkish city of Adana, where the artist was raised, and where Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians faced genocidal erasure in 1909, 1915, and throughout the 20th century. Reflecting on the Turkification of Anatolian food and culture, Akay explores the diasporic legacy and ongoing nature of familial inheritance, reformation, and erasure.

Throughout runs an abecedarium of terms moving in and out of cultural practices, recipes, cooking utensils, plants, gendered expectations, the trans experience, and historical events. The text is a spinning top: asking what happens when one thing turns into another, when one thing is replaced with another, what happens in these moments of erasure and transformation, what persists, and what disappears.

Derya Akay  is an interdisciplinary artist who poetically interprets cooking as a metaphor. They explore the tension between preservation and decay, control and chance, trial and error. Dumpster diving, recalling dreams, hacking and pirating, alley walks and studying weeds also contribute to their process-based practice. 

Hildegard Press 12, 2025 | saddle stitch, 5x7”, digital print, 36 pp. plus sticker page insert