An Archival View of the City: "Once Upon a Time"

In this workshop, Ali Taptık, who is contributing to the Istanbuls Today exhibition with the Topographic Nostalgia series, will be accompanied by the artist Beste Kopuz. In the workshop inspired by these questions; “While the city is changing, transforming, being destroyed and rebuilt at a speed that challenges our memory; will our memories, traditions and rituals be able to withstand extinction in these cycles?”, “What is the effect of history on cities in the traces of the past, present and future? In today's world, where the rubble of ruins replaces the places of memories; how can we talk about the lost places, our memories, the past, and protect all these at the same time?”, participants will have the opportunity to rethink the changing and transforming urban life around the concepts of remembering, forgetting, witnessing and protecting.

This workshop will take place on different dates as two interconnected sessions.

Session 1 (March 19): The artists will share the methods and tools of today's urban archivists, starting from their own artistic and research practices, and will look for ways to ventilate the archives.

Session 2 (March 26): Participants will talk about the relationship they have established with archives and memory from the workshop's first session to the second one and present the archives they have prepared.

Related Exhibition: Istanbuls Today

Ages: 18 years and older
Capacity: 12 people
Fee for the two-day workshop program: 300 TL
Fee for the two-day workshop program for students: 150 TL

The event will take place at the Pera Museum (face-to-face).
For more information: ogrenme@peramuzesi.org.tr

About Ali Taptık
His art and publishing works focus on issues such as urban landscape and architecture representation, the relationship between the individual and the city, and the relationship between literature and visuality. Accident and Fate (Filigranes Editions, 2009); He has books titled Painting Istanbul - Introduction to Turkey's Visual History (in collaboration with Uğur Tanyeli; Akın Nalça Books, 2010), There are no failed experiments (Atelier de Visu, 2012) and Nothing Surprising (Marraine Ginette, 2015). His works have been exhibited in many institutions including Salt (Istanbul), MAXXI (Rome), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut) and the 14th International Venice Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia. He has been running Onagöre since 2017, which he founded, which sets out with the principles of fair sharing and equal voice, and works in the fields of design, research and publishing. Photography and the archival practice that comes with it form the basis of Taptık's approach to his projects. This foundation can be summarized as the search to establish organic links between the past and the future.

About Beste Kopuz
The artist, who produces in a multidisciplinary style, focuses on the city’s history, the memory of the place, and the layered network of relations established with the place by conducting archival studies.  The artist believes that one of the most important features of cities is that they cannot be completely destroyed and in any case, have traces of their past. In her productions, she looks for these traces in the city and questions the re-creation of the old with the new. Her studies were exhibited in both local and international platforms such as Mamut Art Project 2017, BASE 2017, CAPTCHA Design Festival, Mixer, Space Debris, and Şehre BAK. In November 2019, she opened her first personal exhibition titled "Kazıklıköy" at Versus Art Project. She joined the Istanbul Architecture and Urbanism Research Academy in 2020 and the Istanbul Biennial Work and Research Program in 2022. She lives in Istanbul and continues her postgraduate education at Hacettepe Fine Arts Institute painting department.