As time goes by

The impermanence of life, and both the pain and comfort that can promise, threads through much of Scottish artist Robert Montgomery's work currently on display at the Istanbul'74 gallery in the Galatasaray neighborhood of Istanbul.

Billboards and neon signs are his canvases for text-based works both politically aligned against these mediums' usual capitalist, establishment messaging and personally resonant of the longings and fears such advertisements emptily offer to assuage.

Some serve as reminders of how quickly beautiful moments can pass by:

"...Every morning some of
the things you have 
loved will always be 
behind you."

Others as assurances that the oppressive forces in the world will also eventually come to an end:

Montgomery's works speak of civilizations that have crumbled, dreams that have withered, people and places that have become lost to us.... but also of how those losses are themselves impermanent. One particularly bittersweet piece concisely conjures up the human connections so deeply affecting that you may never be fully free of them:

What the words leave open to interpretation is whether the "ghosts" are benevolent presences, or haunting ones, evoking memories that you cherish the ability to revisit, or ones painful to recall, but more painful yet to let go.

TO VISIT: "Robert Montgomery" is on view until 18 April at the Istanbul'74 gallery in Istanbul's Galatasaray neighborhood. The gallery is open Monday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and Saturday from 1 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Free admission.

Out of many, one

The undulating screen hanging from the ceiling seems to wave like a flag in the breeze as its tiny LCD panels flicker in and out, one image fading into another. Though completely different in physical form

A detail of 'Sakıp Sabancı'
(Photo: Sakıp Sabancı Museum)

and artistic style from Botticelli's paintings of the Medicis or Sargent's portrait of Rockefeller, this video art piece by Turkish artist Kutluğ Ataman is likewise a commissioned portrait of a wealthy patron -- in this case Sakıp Sabancı, described in the wall text at his namesake museum as "the late Turkish industrialist who transformed Turkey into a modern developing country."

"Wow, all by himself?" my friend asked, tongue firmly in cheek, as we read the description before entering the darkened room at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum where Ataman's unimaginatively titled artwork "Sakıp Sabancı" is on display until 10 August.

Unlike historical portraits of the rich and powerful, however, this one contains multitudes -- it's made up of thousands of passport-sized photographs of "people from all walks of life whose paths crossed the famous businessman's in some way." But whether it's a particularly generous approach or a particularly grandiose one is harder to ascertain.

'Sılsel' at the Galata
Greek School in 2012

Watching the hypnotic digital dance above our heads, I wondered, does Ataman's work challenge the "great man" approach to history by creating a portrait of Sakıp Sabancı made up of all the people who influenced him and touched his life -- a humbling recognition of how we are all in many ways the sum of our encounters and experiences with others -- or perpetuate it by enlisting the images of many anonymous people in celebration of the single one who gives the artwork its name?

Visitors to the Sabancı Museum are invited to submit their own ID photographs to be added to the piece, an interactive element that hearkens back to Ataman's previous project "Sılsel," in which viewers could contribute their own messages written on a piece of cloth to a freewheeling fabric mosaic also hung overhead. In that case, though, the portrait that ensued was not just of one man, but of a whole country and its hopes and dreams.

TO VISIT: The piece "Sakıp Sabancı" is on display until August 10 at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul's Emirgan neighborhood. The museum is open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. General admission is 15 Turkish Liras.

Emotional cartography

"Looking at things too much celebrated, like views of beautiful cities, is equal to not seeing anything at all. Our brain, as soon as [it] acknowledges the images, doesn't need to work on them."^*

A patch of earth. A dinner plate. A gas station. A row of chairs. The subjects of young Turkish photographer Cemre Yeşil's series "This Was" ("Bak Bu") are the polar opposites of those discussed by curator Vittorio Urbani in his introduction to an unrelated (though nearby) exhibit. They are things little celebrated, and often not even noticed. But by pairing these simple, yet skillfully composed, camera-phone images with short bits of handwritten text, each work becomes a moving exploration of how the angle of a loved one's foot or a nondescript spot by the sea can evoke powerful personal memories; how the joys and losses we experience attach themselves to the places we pass through everyday, superimposing an emotional map onto the physical one.

Walking home from the exhibit, I was inspired to capture a few of the spots on my own emotional map of the neighborhood in similar style, a humble tribute to Yeşil's fine work, on display through this weekend at Daire Sanat.

This is where I found his cat.

This is how I first learned my way.

This is where I ran in fear.

This is where my heart once sang.

Cemre Yeşil's exhibition "Bak Bu // This Was" can be seen at Daire Sanat on Boğazkesen Caddesi No: 76A, Tophane, Beyoğlu, through June 15. The gallery is open Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday by appointment only.

* Quoted from curator Vittorio Urbani's introduction to Italian artist Flavio Favelli's exhibition "Grape Juice," showing at the Galata Rum Okulu in Karaköy until June 14.

A haunted schoolhouse

Visitors' voices lower instinctively to a hush upon entering the echoing central hall of the Ioakimion School for Girls in Istanbul's Fener neighborhood. Bright sunlight streams through the windows into rooms marked "Orta III" (Middle III) and "Kitaplık" (Library), where multicolored layers of paint peel off into abstract patterns. Desks worn smooth through decades of use sit primly in their rows, facing blackboards from which the final lessons were never erased.

Constructed in 1879 and used as a girls' high school until 1988, when the last six students graduated, the shuttered Ioakimion stands as just one of many melancholy monuments to an Istanbul that once was -- a multilingual, multicultural city full of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. The sense of sadness and loss that has seeped into the school's walls must have been attractive to Greek artist Kalliopi Lemos, whose installation "I Am I, Between Worlds and Between Shadows," a parallel event to the 13th Istanbul Biennial, has offered a rare chance to peek into the school between Sept. 11 and Nov. 10.

Lemos's exhibition, which consists of a piped-in soundtrack of children's voices and seven bronze sculptures of hobbled, headless, hanging, or disfigured human-animal hybrids, is meant to bring attention to "the status of women and children and the upholding of their self-respect and human dignity," according to the artist's statement. Though a worthy aim, this topic is not necessarily what first springs to mind upon viewing her sad grotesques, which is perhaps why Lemos added the overly didactic (if suited to the educational environment) touch of placing articles about violence against women and children on some of the classrooms' empty desks.

Without the interpretative materials provided by the artist, the sculptures in some ways take on an even greater burden, allowing the viewer to project onto their misshapen forms any kind of pain, torment, or alienation. The disturbing figures Lemos has created further haunt the school's abandoned rooms, their ugly scars like physical manifestations of the wounds of a nearly disappeared community and the city it once called home.

TO VISIT: The Ioakimion School for Girls (Fener Yoakimion Rum Kız Okulu) is located at Mektep Sok. 15 in Fener, below the more prominent Fener Greek High School (aka the "Red School"), and is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free.