ISTANBUL — Years before the earthquake hit, Ci Demi was taking pictures of it. The first series of the Turkish artist, Will the world end in the day (2017-2019), imagined signs of impending doom in oddly offbeat urban scenes: a bunch of twisted rebar, an abandoned photo album, a cityscape reflected in piles of concrete blocks.
“I always considered Istanbul as a city living in a countdown, but we don’t know when this countdown started,” Demi said. Hyperallergic.
In what the artist called “a very sad coincidence… [that] sent a shiver down my spine,” an exhibition gallery of Demi’s work opened in Istanbul just two days before disaster struck last month. The epicenter of the twin earthquake which struck on February 6 was not in Turkey’s largest city, as many expected, but about 600 miles away in the country’s southeastern province, Kahramanmaraş. More than 55,000 people have died in Turkey and neighboring Syria.
New images of the aftermath of the earthquake find visual echoes in Demi’s work, particularly her 2018 photograph “Your Lonely Passport and Your Fragile Identity,” in which pink and gray concrete shards are strewn across a carpet. His current show at Mixer with fellow artist Umut Toros, beyond the landscapeis one of multiple exhibitions in galleries in Istanbul’s central Beyoğlu district that were envisioned before the earthquakes, but which speak presciently about the deep sense of grief, pain and disorientation that the whole country is currently experiencing .
“Sometimes I think artists can feel things before they happen,” said curator Elâ Atakan. Hyperallergic about his show A temporary absence to Galerist, which brings together four female artists exploring how people cope with unexpected loss. But the concepts that all of these exhibits grapple with are nothing new in a country that has seen its share of political, cultural and social upheaval, as well as previous natural disasters.
Childhood memories of the 1999 earthquake that struck near Istanbul killing at least 17,000 people, as well as a visit to the fragmented remains of his parents’ old village house have permeated the work of the artist Sibel Kocakaya with a sensitivity towards the fragility of buildings. regard as their sanctuaries. His personal exhibition Earth and structurealso at Mixer, includes small clay sculptures of detached staircases and paintings and collages combining architectural elements in seemingly precarious arrangements.
Pieces of ancient columns and more modern buildings are carried by people walking down one of Istanbul’s main thoroughfares in Sena Başöz’s performance and video installation “The Parade” (2023), on view in his exhibition Possibilities of healing at the Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat cultural center. The work highlights the layers of history on which the city has continually rebuilt itself over the centuries, including after conquest, disaster and dispossession.
Making visible what is hidden and expressing what has been silenced are also key themes of the similarly titled show. Collective ‘healing’ at the new Metro Han Cultural Center. It features more than a dozen female artists, most with ties to Turkey, who find creative ways to tackle topics such as gender-based violence and repressive social norms.
In Leyla Emadi’s site-specific work “Dead End” (2023), the words “Let me tell you a secret / No one is safe from pain / It comes and goes / Comes back, goes again” are engraved in concrete blocks embedded in the steps of a spiral staircase that leads nowhere. Tracey Emin’s video “Sometimes the dress is worth more than the money” (2001) depicts a bride running through an arid landscape to a spaghetti western soundtrack, while İnci Eviner creates a surreal tableau on the tattered fringes of Istanbul in his photograph “Nowhere-Body-Here” (1999), a response to the controversial processes of urban transformation.
The text for the Collective ‘healing’ the exhibition refers to a discovery by Turkish opinion research firm KONDA that women are more likely than men to report being depressed. Rather than offering a palliative approach, the exhibition seeks to explore ways of healing that cannot be bottled up and sold, ways that instead require “looking directly at the pain”, said curator Ayça Okay. Hyperallergic.
After many years of tightening restrictions on free speech, Turks are now doing just that, she added, referring to outcry over the government’s handling of last month’s disaster. “So much has disappeared after the earthquakes, but the [government’s] authority is also gone,” Okay said. “It changed the fear that was in society.”
“The cost was really high but I’m hopeful after a long time for a change in the course of the country,” agreed artist Burçak Bingöl. His work on the show Galerist A temporary absence has its roots in another traumatic time for Turkey, the series of bombings and other violent attacks that terrorized Istanbul, Ankara and other cities in 2015 and 2016. One of these attacks was is produced the day a ceramic sculpture Bingöl was working on exploded inside the kiln.
Afterwards, Bingöl said she found she could not let go of the broken pieces of her destroyed work. “It was kind of an artistic instinct, to figure out how to survive,” she said. Hyperallergic. She glazed the shards and painted flowers on them, then applied a similar floral design to a handwoven silk bomb costume. (Coincidentally, the material was produced by a family from Antakya, one of the cities hardest hit by this year’s earthquakes.)” she says.
The floral costume and shards sat unused in Bingöl’s studio until late 2022, when Atakan approached her to contribute to an exhibit on absence. “When Elâ mentioned the subject to me, I thought of these works but hesitated to revive those days,” said the artist. A week later there was another bomb attack in Istanbul. Bingöl took a series of photographs of herself in the bomb suit and added stems to her ceramic fragments to turn them into flowers (Flawless flow2016-23) that bloom from the floor and walls of the gallery.
In the entrance hall of the Galerist, one of the photographs of Bingöl’s Postulated sequences (2016–23) is paired with a concrete sculpture by Ayça Telgeren of a wrapped, reclining form reminiscent of recent newsreels of earthquake victims covered in fabrics. Telgeren’s work, “Dreamer” (2023), actually depicts a body wrapped in hair, a reference to the famously beautiful locks of her ancestors from the Caucasus region and an artistic response to the loss she feels for a culture. and a language which were never transmitted to him.
“Exhibitions are not just about telling your story, they are more like a portal to a space where people can tell their own stories, which is something we need in Turkey in particular,” Bingöl said. “Art must transform these disasters; no one needs to see a cruel reality over and over again.
The exhibitions will remain on view until the end of the month.
