Neslihan İmamoğlu
Graduating from the Department of Architecture at Yeditepe University in 2012, she completed her Master’s degree in Architectural Design at Yıldız Technical University in 2019. Over the course of a decade at Binat Architecture Media Group, where she served as Digital Publications Coordinator and Creative Director until 2023, she undertook diverse roles including editor, publication coordinator, project coordinator, project manager, researcher, and communications consultant across various projects.
She served as the publication coordinator for the BIM Dictionary, the digital culture, arts, and architecture publication bi-özet, and the bi_özet real estate newspaper; she also held editorial positions at Betonart and Arredamento Mimarlık magazines. In 2020, she was part of the coordination team for the Istanbul Architecture Festival and conducted content development, project management, and research for several cultural, artistic, and educational programs such as PNR.istanbul, Mimarlığa Merhaba, and Vbenzeri Kampüs.
Since August 2024, while working full-time in corporate communications, she has been contributing articles on cinema, art, and architecture to various platforms including Artful Living, Unlimited, Sanat Dünyamız, and Sekans. A graduate of the 6th edition of the Contemporary Art and Curatorship Seminar Program, she has been a member of AICA TR since 2025.
Ways of Not Seeing
Rather than revealing the unseen, the exhibition reminds us of the ways we choose not to see.
In China Miéville's novel The City & the City, there are two cities separated neither by fences nor walls, but by an invisible border. From the day they are born, the inhabitants of these cities are taught to unsee the other city—until the inevitable fate of every border befalls these mysterious cities as well, and a breach occurs. Can those who have begun to see the other city ever succeed in unseeing it again?**
Look closely.
Do you see it?
Do not settle for a single sense; feel, taste, hear, listen!
If you are ready, we begin…
Now… start to unsee whatever you have seen until now. The method is up to you; you can choose to close your eyes, turn your head, or drift into daydreams and unsee what is right in front of you. You can create your own way of not seeing: To ignore, to overlook, to do it in plain sight, to condone, to look away…***
If you wish, you can choose a collective way of not seeing and utilize the tools provided by those in power: It is easiest not to see what is hidden, what has been sacrificed, what is overlooked, what is ignored, what is pushed into the background, what is disregarded, or what is destroyed; you can simply take advantage of this opportunity presented to you without any effort. It will not take long for you to realize that you are a master of this craft, which you might initially think is difficult. First, you will understand how hard it is not to see, and then you will be amazed at how many things you actually manage to unsee every single moment.
This exhibition does not aim to shed light on the unseen or to present different perspectives, but rather to remind us of the ways of not seeing. While we encounter countless images in the news every day, how can we succeed in not seeing genocide, violence, and unjust, unlawful, or unfair regimes? And more importantly, how do we forget that we do this every day, every minute, every second? Some of the works in the exhibition pursue the difficult path and disrupt our game of not seeing. Other works invite us back into this game by directly borrowing a specific way of not seeing.
The works, spread across two floors, address the ways of not seeing in two categories. By looking at the space and the object of the invisible, they search for the causes and forms of not seeing. Where is the unseen? It is right before our eyes, on the other side, no longer there. Who and what is the unseen? The other, the ordinary, the standard, the "now normal," the marginal, the worthless, the defective, the waste…
Now, you may close your eyes.
* This exhibition project, prepared by Neslihan İmamoğlu within the scope of the 6th Edition of the Akbank Contemporary Art and Curatorship Program, was inspired by John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.
** China Miéville’s novel The City & the City constitutes the starting point of this project.
*** In Turkish, each of these actions —ignoring, overlooking, condoning— is expressed through idioms explicitly featuring the word "göz" (eye).