In 2022, she was accepted into the Master’s Program in Design – Curatorial Studies Module at Kadir Has University. She is currently working on her thesis, which focuses on art criticism in Turkish periodicals from the 1950s and 1960s. She also completed the 5th Contemporary Art and Curatorship Program at Akbank Sanat’s Open Dialogue initiative. Zeynep aims to transfer her professional experience as an architect into the fields of curatorship and exhibition design.
Like every old metropolis, alongside the main sewer built almost with its founding, there exists a bed carved out over time by the city’s growth and endless desires—a sediment of broken dreams, remnants of aspirations. Beyoğlu is one of these streams. It is a legend of decadence.“
B. Karasu-Lağımlaranası (The Sewer) or Beyoğlu, Metis Publishing
This exhibition seeks to uncover indications of the impact of how literary and architectural works have shaped both individual and collective memory. Throughout history, humanity’s confrontation with mortality has motivated humankind to produce everlasting artworks throughout history. Beyond serving practical requirements, physical structures represent notions of existence, resilience, and grounding in the World. While the design and construction of space may initially evoke architectural discourse and the construction industry, interdisciplinary research on spatial theory highlights the profound influence of buildings and the built environment on social life (Berger, 2022).
Personal experiences are significantly impacted by the built environment due to the relationship that exists between memory and physical space (Bachelard, 1994; Eiguer, 2013; Ricoeur, 1992). Cities, public spaces, the relationship between buildings and memory, and their representational capacities, alongside fundamental structural elements such as foundations, walls, doors, roofs, and thresholds, as well as building materials, carry meanings and associations tied to collective memory and personal experience. This exhibition focuses into how works of literature portray elements of structure and how they interact with our everyday lives, subconscious, and collective memory. How are collective memory and language related to structural terms like foundation, wall, roof, threshold, infrastructure, and door? In literature, what associations and symbolic meanings have these structural words been utilized to express?
How are images turned into words? Can we ever verbally represent what we see? And in what ways do images themselves work through extra-visual means – appealing to a differently structured medium of knowledge, memory or imagination?
Philostratus the Elder, Images [Imagines/Eikones]- Michael Squire (2012)
The exhibition traces the hidden meanings embedded within expressions by combining the descriptive and narrative power of literature with the visual arts. In the face of increasing polarization and harsh political climates both globally and in Turkey, it aims to explore how lifestyles subtly infiltrate daily life or how the concealed emerges in specific moments. This exploration began with inspiration drawn from Bilge Karasu’s Lağımlaranası (The Sewer) or Beyoğlu, a work left unfinished before his passing.
The Imagines, in other words, occupies something of a cultural, intellectual and artistic cross-roads. This must partly explain the text’s particular concern with ‘seeing as’ vs. ‘seeing in’: do our visual responses stem from a formal ad hoc reaction to material objects, or do they derive from subjective imagination – the mental impression (phantasia) of the seeing respondent)?
Abstraction and Imagination in Late Antiquity- Onians,J. (1980)
Seeking the Traces of Being an Undisclosed Other in Bilge Karasu’s Beyoglu Narrative
Let the boundaries remain in the maps, files, and records of those in charge of governance. What we need is not their measurements, but our own. The raging, muddy, glittering flood of millions of people.
We can enter the discourse through any random pit, side, sidewalk, or door. In the midst of this current, in this flood, what importance could there be to a single point? Could there be a name?
B. Karasu-Lağımlaranası (The Sewer) or Beyoğlu, Metis Publishing
Bilge Karasu is renowned nationally as well as globally for his literary and intellectual works, and he is regarded as one of the pioneers of Turkish postmodern literature. Born in Istanbul to a Greek mother and a Jewish father, Karasu's memories of Beyoğlu are primarily linked to his childhood, as he had to move to Ankara with his mother. As both a minority and a queer writer, and considering the ideological climate during the nation-building process of the Turkish Republic, he produced his literary work while distancing his public persona from the differences in his identity, and this approach was widely accepted. At the age of 18, he changed his name from Israel to Bilge (Wise), adopting a gender-neutral name that also symbolized his strong connection to his roots.
Karasu passed away before completing the Beyoğlu project he had envisioned throughout his life. His sentences offer a unique window into exploring Beyoğlu, touching on themes such as diversity, conflict, displacement, and the search for belonging. The terms found in Karasu's expressions—such as courtyard, pit, corner, crack, and sewer—unfold to reveal a wealth of information and personal experiences related to the political climate of the era, the physical and social structure of Beyoğlu, daily life, what is visible and invisible, what is concealed and what overflows.
"I will examine how Pera-Beyoğlu simultaneously conceals and reveals typical minority identities. Karasu's avoidance of directly referencing his own ethnic-cultural identity in Lağımlaranası calls attention to the pressure that has been determining in the construction of self in these narratives. At the same time, Karasu’s depiction of otherness becomes legible precisely through this absence. The Beyoğlu Karasu describes, although not explicitly stated, is a place inhabited by the others of the space created by Turkish nationalism, a place marked by difference. The child remembered by Karasu in Lağımlaranası signifies belonging to this multi-ethnic place once inhabited by non-Muslim minorities."
Ü. Gökberk- Excavating Memory-Bilge Karasu’s İstanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin
References
- Bachelard, G. (1992). The Poetics of Space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1958)
- Berger, V. (2023). From spatial forms to perception: Reassessing Georg Simmel’s theory of space. The American Sociologist, 54(1), 123–146.
- Eiguer, A (2004). The Unconscious of The House. Dunod Press.
- Gökberk, Ü. (2020). Excavating Memory—Bilge Karasu’s İstanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin. Boston Academic Studies Press
- Karasu, B.(1999). Lağımlaranası Ya Da Beyoğlu, haz: Füsun Akatlı, Metis Yayınları
- Mucignat,R (2013). Realism and Space in The Novel, 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies. Ashgate Publishing
- Onians, J. (1980) ‘Abstraction and imagination in late antiquity’, Art History, 3, 1–24
- Ricoeur, P. (2006). Memory, history, forgetting (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
- Squire, M. (2012). Philostratus The Elder, Images (Imagines/Eikones)- (Third Century CE). In D. Newall, G.Pooke (Eds.), Fifty Key Texts in Art History. Routledge