Video documentation of the artist’s book is here.
An announcement of the discovery of the Selamet newspaper’s archive was placed in the classifieds section of a newspaper in Istanbul in the fall of 2015. While there has been numerous Selamet newspapers throughout history, whether this archive belongs to any of these newspapers is never made clear.
The masthead of the newspaper reads, “Sizinle bu mesele etrafında karşılaşmamayı sizin selametiniz namına temenni ederim.” (Nazım Hikmet) [I wish to not encounter you around this issue for the sake of your well-being.]
The Selamet archive appears only through thematic selections and can never be viewed in its entirety. A self-sabotaging archive, the images are displayed with object-driven methods, hoping to be removed from their contexts to reconstruct their archiveness at their new sites.
Themes of surfacing have thus far included horizon, south, verticality, and crack.
Selamet (Verticality) (2015) is the first rendition of the work, peeling off of the walls of the exhibition space.
Selamet (Crack!) (2021) is a wall object that is an assemblage of images and texts from the Selamet newspaper archive. With this rendition, I seek to find out what the wall could carry as an archival space through this multimedia object, trying to tune into the work’s own cracks. The lines depicted on the pink manila folders are traces of the horizon lines in photographs from the archive. The same photographs were also projected at various public spaces to create moments of archival displays around the city, which are documented again through the photographs.
merve ünsal 