Side by Side

Tunca

The twelfth work hosted by Yanköşe, Kahve Dünyası’s contemporary art project, casts a look at the acceleration of urban sprawl in Türkiye from the 1980s onwards, at how shanty construction culture, intermeshed with political pledges, has shaped the present-day urban fabric, and shifted in time, under the guise of “urban renewal”, towards multi-storey, albeit poor-standard constructions over the same plots. The reclaimed windows used in this art installation have been collected and assembled by the artist from Ayvalık and its surroundings. Each of these windows, belonging to a distinct house, a distinct way of life, and a distinct story, reminds the viewers that every individual possesses their own unique window onto the world, in other words their unique perspective. When placed side by side, on the other hand, in spite of all their differences, they start to give rise to a collective urban memory, one that lays bare a shared manner of living and coexisting.

Rather than repurposing those windows, each of which stems from a different house, a different epoch, and a different life, by gathering them up side by side and treating each of them as an archival material, TUNCA transforms them into a common surface, telling the tale of the city’s transformation. Besides, by handling those windows as architectural ephemera, the artist also raises such questions as memory, history, and the traces left behind, all of which frequently come up in his work.