The work

Vergangenheit, in jedem ihrer Momente zitierbar || Past, in Each of its Moments Be Citable || Her Anıyla Alıntılanan Geçmiş

– ongoing since 2015, is above all a love letter to the city of Istanbul.

It follows a practice of not distinguishing between the major and the minor, attending to emotions, to the marginalized, the neglected, and to the most inconspicuous of all transformations — granting each its own language and visual form.

In doing so, I read the German historian and philosopher Walter Benjamin’s¹ notes On the Concept of History as an artistic manifesto: With the desire to write my own poetic history of the city of Istanbul, I wander and document the city in multiple ways — giving recognition to what is usually dismissed as insignificant, in order to make visible the city’s resistance inscribed in the everyday, brushing history against the grain.

[1] Walter Benjamin wrote parts of his final text On the Concept of History in 1940 while fleeing Nazi Europe, on hotel and restaurant bills, envelopes, and other scraps of paper he happened upon. 

The project unfolds through the following methods and media:

[1] Collecting
Collecting discarded photographic material, found on the streets of Istanbul;
or: creating self-constructed archives

[2] Drawings
[2.1] based on the found photographs (Archive Drawings)
[2.2] on the city (arising from the interplay of [3] + [2.3], [4.1] and [5.1]–[5.3])
[2.3] text drawings from the wanderings in [3] + [5.1], serving to develop [6.2and 8.4]
[2.4] maps of the city

[3] Wandering
as a political act of deceleration (equivalent to drawing and writing)

[4] Documentation
of 45 city wanderings [3] in Istanbul between 2015–2021
[4.1] in the form of over 8,000 photographs
[4.2] in the form of over 1,400 street names

[5] Research
[5.1] on the naming and renaming of Istanbul’s streets and districts (with Duygu Yeral)
[5.2] in the archive of Salt-Research, Istanbul (artistic research)
[5.3] in the private city archive of Aslı Odman and Jean-Françoise Pérouse in Tarlabaşı

[6] Reading performances
[6.1] on On the Concept of History (multilingual performances in exhibition spaces)
[6.2] of my own texts emerging from the research (lecture performance)

[7] Text
A publication-accompanying text, emerging from [1], [2], [4] + [5.1–5.3]

[8] Publications
[8.1] Artist’s Book I (2016, with a text by Caroline Adler), edition of 3
[8.2] Artist’s Book II 2018 / 2025, reworked version of Walter Benjamin’s text »Tarih Kavramı Üzerine / On the Concept of History«, edition of 100
[8.3] Poster edition, currently 11 posters (2025), edition of 100 each
[8.4] participatory publication summarizing the entire project (in progress)

[9] Spatial installations
adapted to the respective exhibition spaces

The different practices are interwoven and mutually dependent, making a linear presentation of the project hardly possible.