On Sunday, April 13th, la Lettura’s Corriere Art Collection presents a striking new cover by Kurdish artist Ahmet Güneştekin, “Sarcophaguses of Alphabet, 2024”: a symbolic and solemn monument that confronts the weight of censorship.
Far more than a sculpture, the work features a massive stone from the mountains of Anatolia crushing thousands of books—a powerful image that denounces the Turkish state’s long history of banning poetry, novels, and essays from 1900 to today. With this piece, Güneştekin sheds light on the fragile state of freedom in his country, where fundamental rights are increasingly under threat. Widely recognized as one of Turkey’s most prominent artists, he lends this image to la Lettura as a reflection of our times.
Beginning Tuesday, April 15th, readers can access exclusive multimedia content through a QR code, including a video in which the artist shares his perspective on the work.
Ahmet Güneştekin: Memory, Myth, and Monument
Born in Batman, Turkey, in 1966, Ahmet Güneştekin is one of the most prominent contemporary artists of the Kurdish and Turkish cultural landscape. Deeply influenced by the oral storytelling traditions of dengbêj singers, his work draws on the mythologies, sounds, and collective memory of his childhood—transforming them into a multidisciplinary language that spans painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance.
After relocating to Istanbul in the late 1990s, Güneştekin conducted nearly a decade of ethnographic research across Turkey, exploring cultural rituals, traditional narratives, and the politics of memory. These investigations laid the foundation for a visual language that critically engages with history and national identity. His first major solo exhibition, The Colours After Darkness (2003), revealed a synthesis of contemporary structures and ancient mythic motifs.
Over the following two decades, Güneştekin’s work has been exhibited across Europe and beyond, from Momentum of Memory at the Venice Biennale to solo shows at Marlborough Gallery in New York and Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien. His practice challenges official historiographies through symbolic counter-narratives, layering color, geometry, and material symbolism to reflect on conflict, displacement, and remembrance.
In 2010, he founded the Güneştekin Art Centre in Istanbul and later established the Güneştekin Foundation, committed to fostering cultural dialogue, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration. His recent sculptures—such as those shown in The Infidel Quarter and The Age We Wake Up—combine carved stone with spiral metal structures, evoking fragmented landscapes, ritualistic forms, and cycles of transformation.
Whether exploring Göbekli Tepe’s ancestral codes or the personal relics of migration and exile, Güneştekin’s art is a bold act of reclamation, an ongoing effort to preserve memory and give visual form to untold histories. His work stands at the intersection of cultural resilience, artistic resistance, and myth reimagined for the present.
Sarcophaguses of Alphabet: Ahmet Güneştekin’s Monument to Censorship
Launching with the April 13th cover of la Lettura’s Corriere Art Collection, Kurdish artist Ahmet Güneştekin presents a work that is both sculpture and symbolic protest. A massive stone from the mountains of Anatolia crushes thousands of books: an image as stark as it is eloquent, denouncing over a century of censorship in Turkey, where poetry, novels, and essays have been routinely banned since 1900.
This is not simply an artistic gesture, but a funerary monument to the silenced, a visual eulogy for suppressed voices and erased narratives. With this cover, Güneştekin confronts the violent weight of institutional repression, reminding us that the most basic freedoms are still vulnerable to erasure.
As Gianluigi Colin, la Lettura’s Art Director, reflects: “This isn’t just a sculpture, it’s a true funerary monument. A stone, sourced from the mountains of Anatolia, is positioned to crush thousands of books… a powerful, painful work that denounces the Turkish state’s long-standing habit of censoring and banning countless books—poetry collections, novels, essays—published from 1900 to today.”
For Güneştekin, long known for his commitment to civil and political engagement, this act is part of a broader artistic practice rooted in memory, mythology, and resistance. Through his use of scale and symbolism, he draws attention to the enduring impact of cultural silencing. As Colin notes, the work “speaks to the dark moment his country is experiencing; days in which the most basic values of freedom are under serious threat, if not outright erased.”
Beginning Tuesday, April 15th, readers who purchase the collectible edition will gain access to exclusive video content via QR code, in which the artist explains the meaning and urgency behind the piece.
In an era marked by disinformation and repression, Güneştekin’s voice rises, brave, forceful, and thankfully not solitary, as a cry for freedom that echoes far beyond borders.