LURKING IN THE SHADOWS
Built by the Italian architect Constantin Pappa in Istanbul’s Harbiye-Elmadağ-Taksim triangle during the early 1900s, the Arif Paşa Apartment is a large building that has managed to preserve its grandeur despite decades of neglect.
Unfortunately, right in front of the building are the remains of an incomplete construction project, abandoned more than 15 years ago. This is a vast plot of land where the Şan Theater and Armenian Nursing Homes once stood. Now only their facades remain, resembling nothing so much as a Hollywood movie set. Today, between Talimhane and Elmadağ sits a huge concrete crater, the legacy of a string of failed efforts to develop the area. The only thing that moves amidst this huge ruin are cranes and their wind-powered lights, illuminating the area like a lighthouse.
The state of the construction site could be a metaphor for the state of the country: makeshift, grey, vulgar, it imbues the beauty around it with its moody decay and, with a void at its heart, is left indefinitely to its fate. The crane towering above the site reminds me of the little yellow robot in the animation “WALL-E”: lonely and sad but programmed to work relentlessly to collect and clear debris. The lights of the crane sway in the wind and blink on at dusk, seeping into the flats through skewed windows to illuminate a forsaken antique . The crane’s lights refract through the distorted glass of its window panes, constantly changing the appearance of the rooms within, depending on the position of the crane and the walls on which the light comes to rest. Abstract, multilayered, modernist, sometimes almost three-dimensional, and often animated, most of the photographs in this selection were taken at night in these desolate rooms and corridors. Each space—modest, empty and obscure—has been brought to life momentarily by the light of a renewal process that never actually begins.
