Movement, Memory, and Magic Hour
Istanbul in mid-May is golden. The light stays longer, the ferry decks get a little more crowded, and the city starts to stretch into its summer self. This week took me into neighborhoods I will never see, into a garden that smelled like orange blossoms, and onto a rooftop where strangers turned into dinner companions.
“State of Occupation,” Gülsün Karamustafa at BüroSarıgedik & Merdiven Art Space
May 5 – July 1, 2025
This exhibition didn’t whisper Istanbul’s story — it pressed it into your skin. Spread across BüroSarıgedik and the steep stairwells of Merdiven Art Space, A State of Occupation by Gülsün Karamustafa brought a quiet, enduring pressure, like the memory of a city that refuses to be forgotten even as it’s being transformed.
Karamustafa has long mapped the politics of place and memory, but this show felt particularly intimate — not just because of the scale of the works, but because of how directly they engaged the shifting psychology of Istanbul itself. Through collages, video, assemblage, and found objects, she gave form to a city haunted by its own constant reinvention. You could feel the weight of vanished neighborhoods and redrawn borders in every careful construction.
I moved slowly through each room, especially drawn to the pieces where domestic textures — lace, textiles, tools — were stitched into strange new geographies. These weren’t nostalgic gestures. They carried grief, and clarity. Her video work pulsed with unease, especially where it touched on the mechanisms of erasure — how buildings are scrubbed of their stories, how the aesthetic of a street can overwrite the truth of who once lived there.
There’s something potent about seeing this work in Istanbul, knowing that the city is both her subject and her material. Karamustafa doesn’t offer solutions. Instead, she reveals the contours of loss — the city’s lost voices, lost rhythms, lost freedoms — and in doing so, insists that none of it disappears without a trace.
Address: BüroSarıgedik – Merdiven Art Space, Halil Paşa Ykş. No:3, Galata, Istanbul
Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanical Garden
One afternoon I finally made the trip out to this vast garden near Ataşehir. It’s more like a park-meets-laboratory than a formal botanical space—but that’s its charm. Poppy fields, rare tree groves, an herb spiral where I crushed leaves between my fingers. I brought a sandwich and stayed much longer than planned. It’s a quiet, living archive of Anatolian flora—and a peaceful break from Istanbul’s harder edges.
Address: TEM Yanyolu No:32, Ataşehir
This was a week of subtle rhythms—of shadow and light, string and stone. Istanbul always has its grand stages, but often, the beauty lives in the little scenes.
Why Turkiye? 
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