Hooft, dulband, sylvestris
In this installation, Cihad Caner brings together several narrative threads that emerge from an ongoing research project into the history of Friesland. The starting point is a seventeenth-century gable stone in Leeuwarden, known as the Turkse Hooft. The stone depicts an imagined Turkish figure wearing a turban and was relocated several times over the centuries, causing its meaning and context to shift along with it.
A second thread follows the wild tulip (Tulipa sylvestris), which was brought to the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and later became naturalised in Friesland. The history of this flower intersects with that of the gable stone: the word “tulip” derives from words associated with the turban, such as tülbend and dulband.
These connections take on another layer through archival material about guest workers who arrived in Grou to work in the local wood factory. The figure of the Turk, once a symbolic image on a façade, reappears here as a real person whose presence became part of the region’s history.
Through archival materials, historical objects and associative connections, the installation explores how images, words, people and objects move across time and space, and which unexpected relationships between local histories and broader stories of migration and representation come into view.
