What we Want to See

Genre:              In situ ephemere intervention in public space

Material:          Iron construction, screws, wood panels, black acrylic                                                        color

Dimensions:    600 x 620 x 380 cm

Year of origin: 2005

 

 

Approaching my installation in Istanbul‘s Persembe Pasha Park you encounter a wooden wall covering the front of a statue. It is the statue of Mimar Sinan, the greatest famous Ottoman architect, to whom Istanbul owes much of its unique image. Almost a decade ago the city council placed the statue directly opposite the Mosque-skyline of the Golden Horn. On the one hand, the statue’s position creates a direct optic axis between the master and his work, between cause and effect. On the other hand, this sculpture is surrounded by the ongoing urban reshaping of Istanbul‘s shore and the regeneration of a trade district into a park. Hence, the statue is a hinge connecting the view of the picturesque Istanbul (the quintessential tourist vision of the city) with the precious decorative function of a traditional bourgeois park containing large naturalistic statues of prominent figures in the history of the city.My intervention interrupts the statue’s hinge-role by distorting and turning both its functions against each other. The makeshift wooden wall annihilates the decorative capacity of the statue. We need to climb the stairs of the scaffolding to see the front of the sculpture. Once at the top, we are no longer free to take in the skyline of Istanbul. We have to look through an aperture on the wooden wall and what we see is just a post card motif pulled out of Istanbul‘s skyline: Sinan‘s Süleymaniye Mosque.