Cafe Recordis, Borga Kantürk, April 29 – June 4, 2011, Gallery NON

Borga Kantürk’s third solo exhibition “Cafe Recordis” is the first comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work in Istanbul since 2005. The exhibition focuses on the journey of personal memories between different times and related objects that belong to social memory; and it has been formed on the basis of the randomly encountered and documented harbour and sea-shore images from cities Kantürk was invited to as an artist from 2005 to 2008.

The Latin word re-cordis, which Kantürk initially came across in Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces, and its Spanish equivalent recordar, mean to remember, but also to pass back through the heart.

Cafe Recordis offers the viewer a structure in which three different atmospheres are nested within each other. The design of the gallery entrance refers to a ferry harbour. This part of the exhibition is reserved for repetitions and objects. The image of an ambiguous and blurred ship and a harbour are at the forefront, and this section contains reproductions of everyday objects we may encounter in a cafe, like a tv screen, a music-box, a calendar, a clock and an ashtray. A mirror produced in reference to the snellen chart used by opticians and the repeated sentence “As you passed by the shore” sliding past on the led-screen (borrowed from the song ‘Gemiler/Ships’ as performed by Orhan Atasoy in 1993) are the key to our passage to the 2nd part of the exhibition.

In the second part based on the theme of “going down to the seaside.” This part features as part of the journey a wallpaper designed around the theme of The Cabin On Chicken’s Legs (or The Hut on Fowl’s Legs) (from a Slavic fairy-tale) going down to the beach on one side, and the photograph of a shanty-house built on the beach on the other. Between these two houses, emphasizing the themes of moving and settling, we encounter the painting of a dark-skinned boy, painted in warm tones, playing with a football on a Brasilian beach. This painting, a further step in Kantürk’s recent work focusing on the relationship between football and passion, orients us towards another work related to football, this time on the upper floor of the gallery. The 3 t-shirts hung out with pegs on washing lines strewn between the upper floor railings of the gallery, and the three drawings that complement them, bear witness to the football world’s relationship with politics and resistance via events from Brasil, England and Egypt.

The third part of the exhibition is titled “Promenade Street” and it points towards a time beyond all these moments that have been experienced. Intermediary events and remembrances refer to trips to seaside streets in summer resorts, to our dialogues with those silent heroes of literary works such as the seagull or the raven and to our solitary trips to the seashore.

Cafe Recordis is an imaginary cafe; however, in order to take a small step into reality, it has organized a radio programme. Once a week, professional radio show producers will design 45-minute programmes consisting of music related to and inspired by the images and atmosphere of the exhibition. The programme will be broadcast throughout the duration of the exhibition from a frequency to be announced.