After Earthquakes, Art in Istanbul Takes on New Resonance, Jennifer Hattam, δημοσίευση στο Hyperallergic [16/3/2023]

Ci Demi, photograph from the series Will the World End in the Daytime (Kıyamet Gündüz Mü Gelecek) (2017–2019) (courtesy the artist)

ISTANBUL — Years before the earthquake actually happened, Ci Demi was taking photographs of it. The Turkish artist’s first series, Will the World End in the Daytime (2017–19), imagined signs of the impending disaster in eerily off-kilter urban scenes: a bouquet of bent rebar, an abandoned photo album, a cityscape mirrored in stacks of concrete blocks.

“I’ve always looked at Istanbul like a city living in a countdown, but we don’t know when that countdown started,” Demi told Hyperallergic.

In what the artist called a “very sad coincidence … [that] sent a shiver down my spine,” a gallery show of Demi’s work opened in Istanbul just two days before catastrophe struck last month. The epicenter of the twin earthquakes that hit on February 6 was not in Turkey’s largest city, as many have been expecting, but some 600 miles away in the country’s southeast province of Kahramanmaraş. More than 55,000 people have died in both Turkey and neighboring Syria.

News images of the quake’s aftermath find visual echoes in Demi’s work, particularly his 2018 photograph “Your Lonely Passport and Fragile Identity,” in which pink and gray shards of concrete lie scattered on a carpet. His current show at Mixer with fellow artist Umut Toros, Beyond the Landscape, is one of multiple exhibitions at galleries in Istanbul’s central Beyoğlu district that were envisioned before the earthquakes but presciently speak to the profound sense of grief, pain, and disorientation now being experienced nationwide.

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After Earthquakes, Art in Istanbul Takes on New Resonance, Jennifer Hattam, δημοσίευση στο Hyperallergic [16/3/2023]