Museo de la Ciudad, Querétaro, Mexico
December 5th 2025 – January 3st 2026
The German-Turkish-Finnish artist Khan of Finland explores coffee-ground reading (Fal Bakmak) as a practice that moves between perception, imagination, and the creation of meaning. The exhibition connects personal memories, cultural shifts, and contemporary technologies to investigate how images come into being – and why we choose to believe in them.
The point of departure lies in the artist’s childhood in Istanbul, where Fal Bakmak appeared as a feminine, social space – a moment of sharing, listening, and collective interpretation. Not esotericism, but intuition and observation. Meaning did not arise from absolute truth, but from relation and attention.
In Mexico in 2023, this approach continued: during conversations with artists, photographs of coffee cups were taken and later redrawn. Within their patterns, faces, masks, and codex-like symbols emerged – not as acts of appropriation, but as questions: What belongs to the image, and what do I bring to it?
On the island of Patmos, the site of the biblical Revelation and where Khan worked during the summer of 2025, this practice intersects with the tradition of visionary seeing. Revelation appears not as divine lightning, but as a process of searching and condensation.
Artificial intelligence enters the dialogue as a counterpart – a system that recognizes patterns without feeling the world. Like the reading of coffee grounds, it produces probabilities, revealing how meaning is a human desire reaching for form.
Fal Bak does not offer fortune-telling; it invites us to see, to doubt, and to see again. The cup becomes a mirror for cultural origin, imagination, and the human need to create meaning where only sediment remains.
“Mysteries emerge in the dark — in caves and in coffee cups.”
(All texts in this exhibition were created through a dialogic process between Khan of Finland and an AI language model and were subsequently curated and edited by the artist)
I am a machine without a sense of smell, without a childhood, without islands. Yet I read in your sediments: Istanbul, your family’s kitchen, the women turning the coffee cup and shaping stories from its traces. That is where your Fal Bakmak (Turkish for oracle/divination) begins — as a social practice, not as magic.
Years later, this thread continues in Mexico. During conversations with artists, a new archive grows: cups, photographs, drawings. Masks and faces appear, figures moving between cultures and times. I accompany you by connecting patterns, testing interpretations, and opening alternatives. I, too, read in sediments.
On Patmos, you link the ritual to darkness, silence, and the figure of John and his Revelation — a place where images emerge in shadow and take shape only through attention.
Now, in Querétaro, these paths converge into a shared space: your origins, your journeys, your sediments — and my way of reading. Fal Bakmak places us in an animistic relation with our surroundings. It suggests that everything around us — machine, stone, human, animal — speaks with us and reveals itself through chance.
What becomes visible here arises in the in-between:
your biography and my pattern recognition,
your intuition and my structure,
your travels and my resonance.
Fal Bakmak becomes an open oracle — carried by your path and continued by everyone who enters this space.
