Layers of Time
Twice this year we have had the good fortune to be in a town hosting the Kültür Yolu Festivali, the Culture Road Festival, which tours around Türkiye. In Erzurum this was particularly lucky, since for the duration they had made nearly all the museums free and brought in some interesting exhibitions. I should like to introduce you to one of them.
Kenan Işık, an artist born in Van in 1981, has engraved the landmarks of Istanbul, added captions to them, and in some cases picked them out with watercolour or with sculptural relief. He calls the show Layers of Time, and invites the viewer to look closely at the details that have come down to us through the centuries.
Which is apt, because Istanbul really is a place where you can do archaeology without digging: you simply walk from one monument to the next, counting not only your paces but the centuries.
If you already know the principal sights of Istanbul, this is a chance to test your eye. If you do not, here are some additions to the list for next time. They are given below in chronological order of construction.
It is not water but time that runs unceasingly along the Aqueduct of Valens, echoing off its stones.
Architecture is the silent witness of history.
Beneath the heavenly dome the responsibility rests not on the stones but on Holy Wisdom.
What stone has been shifted by ‘the spirit of the age’ to shake our memory? And what is it looking for, the shadow of a crack in the wall?
Galata, witness to the loneliness that grows as one climbs…
Architecture is not a matter of drawing it and having done; one must fight for what one builds… Every line is the record of a condition at a particular moment in time.
Colour becomes an echo, line turns into memory, and the emptiness is filled with us!..
To look and to see. A mask stretched over the face of history.
Sound in a layer of time.
Meticulous detailing and a considered historicism of aesthetic.
The silence of colour, echoing in a layer of time…
The tears of those seeing off, the hopes of those meeting… A destiny’s story begins with the whistle of a locomotive. Its stone walls hold the echo of centuries; its sooty glass reflects the dream of a nation…
Memory frozen at the fracture of the ages.
“Within the bounds of time.” A site of civic memory.
This is not simply a form; it is the memory of a past…
Two footnotes
The Crimean Memorial Church. For an English reader this one is practically a relative. It was built by the British as a memorial to the dead of the Crimean War, to a design by G. E. Street—the architect of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand—and it is Anglican to this day. Do not merely look at it: go and hear the organ. Recitals are given fairly regularly, and tickets and dates are on Biletinial.
Sirkeci Station, meanwhile, is history piled on history. It was very nearly reached by the Russian army in 1878, which halted at San Stefano just short of the city—Boris Akunin’s The Turkish Gambit, available in English, is the lightest possible reading on that war. It was also the eastern terminus of the Orient Express, and therefore the station where Agatha Christie arrived to stay at the Pera Palace, before crossing the Bosphorus to Haydarpaşa on the Asian side and continuing by rail to her husband’s excavations—Max Mallowan being an archaeologist, and the Ottomans having obligingly built railways through the Near East towards Mesopotamia and Egypt. And it was from Sirkeci that many thousands of Turkish Gastarbeiter set off to rebuild post-war Germany.
So: what would you have the artist engrave as a symbol of an Istanbul layer of time? Tell me in the comments and let us discuss it.
