The starting point of these works that come together in the exhibition titled ‘Days’ is the exhibition space itself.
Arif Pasha Apartment Building is an eclectic building built by architect C. Pappas for the last palace doctor Arif Sarıca Pasha at the beginning of the Ottoman modernization period.
When I saw the room of the apartment building used as an exhibition space, I was obsessed with the fact that the giant windows, which are one of the distinctive features of this building, signaling a period when privacy began to break down, were blocked by the ‘white wall’ built inside the room and natural light was cut off. Although the architecture of the building was in contact with the outside with its large windows and large balconies, the entire facade with balconies faced the courtyard instead of the street and revealed a relatively closed structure.
The period when I encountered this building was a period when I felt that the space surrounding me was getting narrower and narrower, and I was living a very isolated life in the same environment. I researched the history and architects of the place for a while. Almost all of Pappas' surviving buildings were in Kadıköy, Moda. The process that started with a wall in Elmadağ and a window visible from its edge brought me back to Kadıköy and made me walk again and again through the streets that were the center of my youthful memories, strengthening the feeling of belonging and being stuck. I can say that the feeling that shaped the exhibition is the feeling of being trapped in a changed/transformed belonging that no longer exists.
The works consist of 3 ‘walls’ that reconstruct the inverted U-shaped closed form of the building, a quotation-text written on the floor with nails, emphasizing the effort to be in the ‘now’ and to leave a trace, and 2 sound compositions located at the ends of the space, crossing the space and hitting each other. The sound experience is differentiated according to the position during the movement in the space. The works are placed in the space like a single fragmented structure, narrowing the dimensions of the room and the space for movement.
The works titled Notebook, Shell, and Landscape emphasize the change of state, trying to be oneself through metamorphosis. They imply a loss/void and physically frame the void in the room. A notebook trying to become a wall, the skin of a wall at the opposite end (Moda), and the paintings that try to emphasize the gap and distance between it and the window by making the wall it is hung on transparent.
“Notebook” is a record of the scribbles in the notes I took during my walks in Moda. Reflecting the wall covering the window, it is positioned as a curtain wall at the entrance of the room. It restricts movement and gaze.
"Crust / Skin" on the left side of the room, is a mold taken from the garden wall of the mansion of a Levantine family who lived in Cape Moda. A dysfunctional wall preserved as a ‘relic’, a remnant of identity and culture that shaped the history of the neighborhood but has unfortunately been erased from this geography, the standing garden wall of the demolished mansions of the Lorando family. The changing skin of this wall is placed as a patch on the white smooth wall of Arif Pasha in Elmadağ, which has been renovated inside, as a pale yellow-brown wallpaper that carries the stone, dust, and rust of the past, trying to roughen that wall, joining the white whitewash.
The viewer who turns his/her gaze across the floor is confronted with the view. This is not a picture of the entire window, but only the two wings that can be opened. When one goes behind the wall and looks through the open window, one encounters an invisible landscape blocked by the construction site walls. While making these paintings, I took the time, season, and light as a reference when I first encountered the place.
Ortasındaydayım engraves a line from Edip Cansever's poem Foundryman Niko and His Friends, which is also the source of the exhibition's title, on the floor of the space, making the trace of existence in the present visible through a performative act. This scattered text also signifies a change of identity and the alienation and stuckness that come with this change.
The ‘closedness’, the narrowing of space, and the state of being stuck, which I have mentioned in this article, are felt even more when we look at the history of the building and the city. We see that this multi-layered city is closing in on itself more and more. In the section where I took this line from Cansever, there are 12 characters speaking and each of them individually symbolizes the old identity of the city, a polyphonic structure.
All the works emphasize the visible/invisible-even unspeakable- and private/public distinctions together with the concept of ‘loss’. A windowsill visible from the edge of a wall led me to an architect and this experience. Before I started to produce the works, I spent a month and a half in the space. I think that my daily visits to the space during the exhibition, the state of constantly going back and forth between the two sides, were also included in the exhibition. Entering the apartment through the courtyard, encountering the living room of a house with people already living in it, spending time in this intimate(!) space, then crossing the corridor and reaching the exhibition space. All of these make this experience unique for me.
Notebook, 2019
78 Sheets of Paper Sewn Together (Tracing Paper and Pen), 275 x 86 cm
The Scenery, 2019
Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, 52 x 32,5 cm (Each)
