Yapı Kredi Gallery organizes installation, video, and performance programs that go beyond the conventional exhibition format and spatial understanding. Opening with the question, “Do You Remember the Scent of Spring?“ the program unfolds across spaces and seeps through cracks, engaging with how the past is narrated. Bringing together works by Radio Alhara, Basma Alsharif, Levani, Ceren Oykut, Sara Rajaei, Özlem Sarıyıldız, and Viron Erol Vert, this series of videos and installations runs parallel with a performance program featuring Onur Karaoğlu, Tanja Ostojic, Tuğçe Ulugün Tuna, Gülhatun Yıldırım, and Mk Yurttaş, focusing on the role of the personal memory that broke away from official historical narratives. At times semi-fictional and at times rooted in lived experience, these works draw on personal archives, oral histories, family memories, and storytelling.

The program, which extends to the bookstore at the entrance of Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts, the Portico area, the gallery, the stairs leading to the museum, and Loca, as well as the Frankeştayn Bookstore, features a performance series developed in collaboration with Performistanbul. Like the halls of memory one wanders through when recalling the past, the works visit memory chambers and open up possibilities for alternative narratives.

Spread across the glass façade and columns of the Portico, Özlem Sarıyıldız’s installation “De Te Fabula Narratur“ (2022) features sentences the artist collected directly from migrants while working with them. One of these phrases“—Do you remember the scent of spring?—“also frames the program as a whole. The placement of the Latin title, “of you the tale is told,” explores the meaning of the words on the cracks, and the conditions of migration. In “The City of Poets“ (2024), Sara Rajaei imagines a semi-utopian city where, setting out from a family’s photographic archive, she tells the story of a place whose streets were first named after poets, and then after soldiers. Basma Alsharif’s “Comfortable in Our New Homes“ (2017) presents fragments from five interwoven stories where time collapses, and beginnings and endings merge. In “Born in the Purple“ (2021), Viron Erol Vert returns to Sebat Apartment—his family’s apartment and the home of Agos newspaper—through a mysterious animation. Moving from room to room among childhood objects such as figurines, handkerchiefs, and prayer beads, the work reflects on Istanbul’s recent transformations while turning perceptions of time inside out. In her animated work “Map of Neither“ (2022), Ceren Oykut animates her drawings to narrate different rituals inspired by her personal migration story through an imaginary and impossible language. At Frankeştayn Bookstore, Levani’s video a spell: „xvi. tower “(2023) persistently documents the sunset reflected on New York’s Empire State Building with an iPhone camera, combining these recordings with literary excerpts. The images ruminate on the ways of reflection and transformation.

Since 2020, the online radio station Radio Alhara has been broadcasting from Bethlehem. For this show, it extends to the staircases of Yapı Kredi Culture Arts, adding sound and music, and inviting visitors to experience music as a tool for auditory liberation. Gülhatun Yıldırım’s “Just Like“ the Past documents the artist’s 2015 performance walking backwards along Istiklal Avenue. Ten years later, she is invited by Yapı Kredi Gallery and Performistanbul to restage this performance. Can all these approaches, seeping through the cracks of memory, become effective in creating new narratives of history?

Artists:
Radio Alhara, Basma Alsharif, Onur Karaoğlu, Levani, Tanja Ostojic, Ceren Oykut, Sara Rajaei, Özlem Sarıyıldız, Tuğçe Ulugün Tuna, Viron Erol Vert, Gülhatun Yıldırım, Mk Yurttaş.

Curators: Zehra Begüm Kışla & Didem Yazıcı.



Image: Key Visual of the group show „Do You Remember The Scent of Spring?“, Courtesy: Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts, Istanbul.