The Wild Horses

The Wild Horses photo series unfolds a multilayered visual narrative of companionship, traced across the intersecting terrains of nature, myth and body in Diyarbakır’s Hevsel Gardens.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

           Time held me green and dying

      Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

— Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

The Wild Horses photo series unfolds a multilayered visual narrative of companionship, traced across the intersecting terrains of nature, myth and body in Diyarbakır’s Hevsel Gardens. Carried by the historical memory of the Tigris River and embedded within the ecological fabric of Hevsel, the series is hosted at a timeless threshold—one that opens onto both the past and an as-yet-unlived future. 

The series takes its name from The Epic of Gilgamesh, drawing inspiration from Enkidu—who pays for his domestication with the severance of his natural being, but in doing so, is reunited with his companion. Enkidu’s death is the punishment for defying the gods; yet what renders him vulnerable to mortality is his detachment from nature and his entry into the domain of civilization. In this context, the wild horse becomes more than a symbol of the untamed—it stands as a metaphor for forms of companionship that transcend boundaries, norms, and structuring forces. 

Youth appears in the series as both fall and ascent, loss and gain: bodies leaping into water, feet stepping onto mud, fleeting eye contact... All of these gestures carry the ephemeral yet intense imprints of desires and relationships. The pastoral image fragmented by digital distortions, reflections and shades of yellow, summons the fragility of memory into the here and now. 

Within an atmosphere that evokes Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill, the work carries a sense of lost innocence and a raw, unruly childhood suspended in time. The Wild Horses approaches companionship not merely as a bond between humans, but as a vital zone of proximity—formed with nature, animals, technology, and images alike. For some still belong to the lineage of wild horses: Those who resist domestication, who disappear yet persist in memory, and whose dreams haunt the image—forever unbridled.