Mehtap Yılmaz
Mehtap Yılmaz, after completing her business studiesat Boğaziçi University and the University of Exeter, has been working in thebanking sector for many years. She plans to apply her interest in art intopractical projects by combining the insights gained from the Contemporary Artand Curatorship Program—organized with Akbank Sanat and Open DialogueIstanbul—with her 30 years of professional experience. Her main motivation isto work to increase the understanding of contemporary art, making artaccessible, bringing the artist closer to viewers, and developing new businessmodels and collaborations in the art world.
Being Elsewhere
A city is not only buildings but layered memory. The exhibition “Being Elsewhere” explores urban memory and the continuous transformation of space.
The city is not merely an accumulation of buildings and streets. Every building, every corner functions as a repository of memory, carrying traces of the past into the present. The city embodies a layered structure of remembrance in which individual experiences and collective history coexist. Through its streets and squares, crowds and institutions, schools, parks, apartments, plants, and ruins, the urban fabric holds past and present simultaneously within its layers.
The exhibition “Being elsewhere” examines urban memory and the continious transformation of space, addressing both organic processes and interventions imposed from above.
In line with Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire, the streets of Istanbul emerge as sites where collective memory takes roots: Taksim Square, İstiklal Avenue, Tarlabaşı, or neighborhoods that have disappeared. These places contain not only personal recollections but also shared forms of social identity. Aperhaps, as Orhan Pamuk suggests; “what is most valuable about Istanbul is hidden in its ruins, its losses, and its past.”
Under the accelerating pressures of modernization, the city expands through buildings without identity, often detached from memory and historical continuity. The functionality and order celebrated by modernist ideals—most notably articulated by Le Corbusier—have frequently resulted in the erasure of individual and collective narratives, producing spaces that are standardized, interchangeable, and devoid of local specificity.
Unplanned urbanization has become a common condition of rapidly growing cities, posing a threat not only to collective memory and individual identities but also to other forms of life that inhabit urban space. The exhibition traces the visible and invisible consequences of displacement, fragmented urban forms, and spaces emptied of memory.
Urban renewal and transformation processes are often interventionist and coercive in nature. Displaced neighborhoods, demolished buildings, and the luxury housing projects that replace them mark moments in which collective memory is erased with particular intensity. Framed under the discourse of gentrification, such developments dismantle the social and cultural memory of neighborhoods while systematically excluding their long-standing inhabitants.
“Being elsewhere” follows the traces of these transformations across the city. Each artwork makes visible the memories that seep through the cracks on the city’s surface. The exhibition questions the identities lost behind urban renewal projects, gentrification processes, and displaced communities. It invites viewers to wander through forgotten, erased, or transformed sites of memory. Perhaps, searching for a trace within the city’s memory sometimes means finding ourselves somewhere else.