Bilal Hakan Karakaya - Suitcase Children & Tank Model Artwork
Suitcase Children
Suitcase Children is a series that explores migration as more than a geographical displacement, addressing the ways in which people carry with them their memories, families, pasts, and hopes for the future.
In this work, the child figure created from steel shot and fragments represents a generation growing up within the journey of migration, its own story not yet fully written. The birds, metal fragments, and lights surrounding the figure bring together notions of freedom, movement, waiting, and belonging within the same space.
The suitcase used as the pedestal makes the series’ central metaphor immediately visible. Here, the suitcase is not merely an object, but a space in which a life is contained, carried from one place to another, and the memory of what has been left behind is preserved. The future of a child and the past contained within a suitcase converge upon the same structure.
The multitude of small steel shot alludes to individuals and memories coming together to form a collective memory. Light, emerging from within the darkness and density of the material, symbolises remembrance, hope, and life moving towards the future.
Drawing particularly on the experiences of the first generation to migrate to Europe and their children, the work raises the question: “What do we take with us, and what do we leave behind?”
Suitcase Children reminds us that a suitcase can hold far more than belongings: it can carry a family’s past, a child’s memory, and an invisible story passed down from one generation to the next.
Tank Model
Bilal Hakan Karakaya’s Tank Model presents a recognizable industrial object as a small-scale sculpture. The tank’s body, tracks, and barrel are rendered together with the rough texture of steel shot. The particulate texture formed around the hard contours alters the mechanical geometry of the model. The use of glass, steel shot, and metal together further enriches the material diversity of the work.
The work extends Karakaya’s material exploration, developed through human, bird, and architectural imagery, into a technological object. While the model remains readily recognizable, the surface formed by steel shot shifts attention from the representation of the object to the material that constitutes it. The magnet component specified in the work’s technical details is also part of this material construction. By reinterpreting a technological form on a reduced scale, the work brings the sculptural qualities of the industrial object to the fore.
