Double

Invited to a one-day pop-up exhibition at the Istanbul Literature House, I used the brevity of the exhibition slot as a departure point. Located in a historic building, the Literature House has bay windows, which, in the Ottoman context, were used as semi-private spaces that women could use to see more of the world. The two cement sculptures are based on drawings of the light coming in from the bay window at two different points of the day—a physically impossible co-existence, made permanent through cement. In the next room were two site-specific wooden sculptural interventions, one concave, one convex, positioned diagonally from each other. The idea was to separate one whole into two complementary halves and place them across from each other to produce a spatial tension, again creating an impossible co-existence. The photograms of ice melting were placed throughout the exhibition to draw upon making permanent fleeting presences and temporalities. I imagined the installation being embedded in the letter “o” that is missing from the Turkish [duble] of double, thinking about representation as a mode of translation and displacement.