2021
pigment print on vinyl
98.5 x 47 inches
The Memory of Home is Perhaps Also Home is a large scale print of a single photograph taken from the window of the artist’s childhood home, located on a very busy street of a quickly changing neighborhood in Istanbul; Osmanbey. After each visit the view from the window seems a little less familiar.
In the 1970s Osmanbey was regarded as an upper-middle class neighborhood with newly built modern apartment buildings. While still being significant in Istanbul's urban history, Osmanbey is now stripped away from these characteristics and the 2000s paved the way for a more chaotic existence. Pictured here is a glass facade reflecting and distorting what’s right across the street. A significant Art Nouveau building, giant neon signs, pedestrians, windows... The familiar and the yet undefined morph into each other to form an in-between state where urban transformation and personal memory overlap. As the former seems to interrupt the latter, their existence is mutually dependent.
In the 1970s Osmanbey was regarded as an upper-middle class neighborhood with newly built modern apartment buildings. While still being significant in Istanbul's urban history, Osmanbey is now stripped away from these characteristics and the 2000s paved the way for a more chaotic existence. Pictured here is a glass facade reflecting and distorting what’s right across the street. A significant Art Nouveau building, giant neon signs, pedestrians, windows... The familiar and the yet undefined morph into each other to form an in-between state where urban transformation and personal memory overlap. As the former seems to interrupt the latter, their existence is mutually dependent.
Minimum Standards curated by VOGA Art Project
13 August – 20 September 2021
Artists: Amphibia, Safa Attyaoui, Louise DiB, Natalija Dimitrijević, Marianne Fahmy, Ignazio Fabio Mazzola, Qeu Meparishvili, Olga Migliaressi-Phoca, Rehan Miskci, Sara Naim, Violeta Ospina Domínguez
13 August – 20 September 2021
Artists: Amphibia, Safa Attyaoui, Louise DiB, Natalija Dimitrijević, Marianne Fahmy, Ignazio Fabio Mazzola, Qeu Meparishvili, Olga Migliaressi-Phoca, Rehan Miskci, Sara Naim, Violeta Ospina Domínguez
“Minimum Standards is the first initiative of the cultural association VOGA and inaugurates an artistic and curatorial path aimed at placing Bari at the center of the artistic research underway in the Mediterranean cultural panorama. Developed in collaboration with some research spaces and galleries located in countries overlooking the Mediterranean, the project presents works by local and international artists in a collective exhibition that will take place on the main facade of the Palazzo di Città, a building of historical importance and home to the Municipality of Bari. The project is carried out in the context of the "Sea Festival", thanks to the support of the Municipality of Bari and the Culture Department of the Puglia Region. The expression "MINIMUM STANDARDS" refers to the essential quality requirements that make a given context or service equally open and accessbile to all. The expression applies to working conditions as well as to other dynamics of social exchange and exclusion. "MINIMUM STANDARDS" is also the title of this exhibition, which proposes a reflection on the fundamental characteristics defining the nature and function of a public space.
For some time now, the idea of public space as a place to build common social horizons has given way to an urban space understood as a place of inequalities and asymmetries, of exclusion and social disintegration. As Franco Cassano writes in "Il Pensiero Meridiano", the "public" tends to be a residual entity today, something "into which the waste of our private appropriations is dumped with ever fewer scruples". Following the state of exception that the pandemic has brought to the lives of cities, this initiative proposes a reflection to work collectively on an idea of public space that goes well beyond minimum standards. Rethinking urban contemporaneity, to raise new questions about the meaning of life together.”
