News | Nan Ke Gallery announces representation of artist Mustafa Boğa

Photographed by Shin Yatagai

 

Nan Ke Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of artist Mustafa Boğa. Originally from Turkey and currently based between Adana and London, Mustafa maintains an active cross-cultural art practice. He completed his undergraduate studies at Harran University and the Department of Journalism at Istanbul University. After relocating to the UK, he received his first master’s degree in Cinematography and Post-Production from Greenwich University, London, and later pursued a second master’s in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, between 2014 and 2016.

 

In September 2025, Mustafa participated as a guest artist in the 5th Coventry Biennial (Coventry Biennial 2025) in the UK and took part in The Skin of the Earth, a group exhibition organized by Kun Art Space in Adana, Turkey. His practice has been recognized with numerous awards, including The Red Mansion Art Prize (2016). The following year, he performed at Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. In 2018, he was named a “Highly Commended Artist” for the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize and received a residency grant from the RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal. In 2021, he won the Bilsart Video Art Project Fund in Turkey and held a solo exhibition. His works are part of the collection of the Odunpazarı Modern Museum (OMM) in Eskişehir. Mustafa has held solo exhibitions in Istanbul, London, and Shanghai, and continues to participate in international institutional and gallery exhibitions worldwide.

 

 

 

Installation view of For the Lives We Couldn't Hold On To, April 26, 2025 - June 8, 2025, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai ©  Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery,   Photographed by Runxin.

Mustafa’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in memory, heritage, and the emotional landscapes that shape human experience. Informed by his upbringing in southern Turkey, his work explores the entanglement between personal and collective histories through embroidery, image manipulation, photography, and the use of found materials. His practice centers on rituals and narratives that define cultural identity, reconfiguring them to question how memory is preserved, distorted, and reconstructed over time.

 

 

Installation view of Coventry Biennial, Coventry, UK, 2025©  Courtesy of the artist.

 

Embroidery — a tactile and labor-intensive craft — holds a particular fascination for him. Traditionally dismissed as domestic or decorative labor, it becomes in his work a site of resistance and storytelling. By layering thread over images, textiles, and archival materials, he creates visual interventions that highlight absence, loss, and transformation. His sustained engagement with embroidery seeks to push the conceptual and technical boundaries of the medium — using needle and thread as tools for recording, archiving, and reimagining both personal and collective histories. Within the dense accumulation of stitches and materials, he evokes intimacy and slowness as a counterpoint to the instantaneity of contemporary digital culture.

 

 

Installation view of Don’t Look Back, Deep is the Past, Odunpazarı Modern Museum (OMM), 2021©  Courtesy of the artist.

 

Beyond personal narrative, Mustafa’s background in journalism and film endows his practice with a documentary methodology. Through the integration of research, interviews, and found materials, he constructs multilayered structures that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, past and present. By juxtaposing and interacting with materials, he challenges fixed narratives and opens up spaces for reinterpretation.

 

His artistic practice consistently moves along the threshold between craft and contemporary art, seeking to build a bridge between traditional storytelling and modern expression. By recontextualizing both personal and cultural histories, Mustafa invites viewers to contemplate the layered complexities of memory, belonging, and transformation—both within the self and in the broader world we inhabit.

  

Textile, free hand machine embroidery

54h x 107w cm 

© Courtesy of the artist

 

Textile, free hand machine embroidery

53h x 76w cm

© Courtesy of the artist