Ivan Grohar Gallery

Curators: Anabel Černohorski, Ezgi Ceren Kayırıcı

The exhibition by Turkish artist and university lecturer Borga Kantürk weaves together the personal with broader social and political realities through drawings, photographs, video(documentation) and collages. Rooted in a distinctly documentary, diaristic and archival practice, Kantürk chronicles his daily life and the events that shape it – from the academic environment and artist residencies to natural disasters, protests and football as a site of solidarity and resistance. His works often integrate clippings from printed media alongside a wide range of art-historical, literary and cinematic references.

The earliest work in the exhibition, Becoming a Survivor (2005), already demonstrates Kantürk’s diaristic approach and his engagement with newspapers as a source of imagery and aesthetics linked to bureaucratic environments that recur throughout his practice. Created during an artist residency in Finland, the work reflects the artist’s sense of isolation caused by the language barrier and his position as a foreign newcomer. Each day, he selected one image from a local newspaper as a symbolic way of engaging with the local community he could not fully access. He recalls that, coinciding with a national holiday, Helsinki appeared almost deserted, leaving him with the uncanny impression of wandering through a post-apocalyptic city. This experience inspired the title Becoming a Survivor, alluding to the zombie horror film 28 Days Later (2002). The work’s diaristic quality and artist’s intimate engagement with his surroundings are echoed in his later projects such as Black Frames (2025), a series of 25 Polaroid photographs that transform fragments of Kantürk’s daily life into immediate, tangible diary entries, bordered with black frames.

The central installation of the exhibition, Concrete Cover (2023), occupying most of the first gallery room, also adopts this diaristic method, though on a collective rather than personal scale. Its geometric forms – painted over newspaper clippings depicting buildings – recall the abstract language of early 20th century Suprematism, a reference also present in Black Frames (where the stark black borders evoke Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square). The work consists of 94 sheets of papers organised in archival folders. In the gallery, the sheets are pinned to the wall while the folders are left open to reveal their contents. At its core, the piece refers to the devastating twin earthquake that struck southern Turkey and northern Syria in 2023, functioning as a document of collective trauma rather than private memory.

Kantürk has deliberately painted over the ruins next to standing buildings in the newspaper photographs from that time, so the visible destruction is absent. This symbolic act of covering recalls mechanisms of censorship and erasure, mirroring how the tragedy was quickly overshadowed by the Turkish general elections that same year. Yet what also disappears under the plaster-like paint is the human factor. Beyond the natural disaster itself, the high death toll was intensified by systemic failures: delayed and poorly coordinated aid efforts, harsh winter conditions in which many froze to death, and – most starkly – the collapse of newly built structures that should have met earthquake safety standards. As international reports revealed, corrupt construction practices and unenforced regulations left entire neighbourhoods vulnerable, turning what could have been a preventable tragedy into a catastrophe of historic proportions.[1] The same region has since faced new disasters, including widespread wildfires in 2025, underlining its ongoing environmental and social precarity.

Numerous works stem directly from Kantürk’s role within the academic environment, highlighting both the systemic shortcomings of higher education and their impact on his artistic practice. For more than two decades, Kantürk has been closely tied to the Department of Painting at the Dokuz Eylül University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in Izmir, first as a student and later as a lecturer. Over this time, he has witnessed how government interventions reshaped Turkish universities: elected rectors were dismissed, academics pressured to conform and student needs often sidelined, turning institutions into systems preoccupied with statistics – such as numbers of graduates or publications – rather than with people. At Dokuz Eylül, these policies culminated in the relocation of the Faculty of Fine Arts to the city’s outskirts, into a former administrative building ill-suited for studio teaching. For Kantürk, this signalled not only the physical displacement of the school but also the symbolic dismantling of an environment essential for artistic learning.

This aspect of Kantürk’s practice is reflected in two works included in the exhibition. Jury (2018) documents the setting for oral entrance exams, now serving as an archive of a discontinued practice that once enabled direct encounters between candidates and faculty members. After Rothko (2020) features soap ready-mades photographed with Polaroid film, referencing Mark Rothko’s abstract paintings and acting as a metaphor for art’s persistence within highly sanitised and bureaucratic settings during the pandemic, when human interaction was further restricted. Together, these works trace the loss of hands-on, human-centred education and its replacement by administrative procedures – a challenge that resonates across universities worldwide, where bureaucratization is gradually overshadowing research and teaching.

Building Libraries (2021–) originated during the pandemic, when the closure of libraries prompted the artist to reflect on whether a book’s value is found in its physical presence or the ideas it contains. The project also raises questions about the precarious state of libraries in Turkey – often underfunded and subject to political disinterest – as well as the vulnerability of collections more broadly. When Kantürk’s on-site artist residency in Istanbul turned into a stay-at-home programme, he shifted his attention from institutional libraries to his own collection.

The series draws inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel, which envisions a universe of knowledge as an infinite labyrinth, and Alberto Manguel’s book The Library at Night, a meditation on libraries and collecting. Reinterpreted by Kantürk on an intimate, personal scale, books from private or institutional collections are arranged into temporary architectural forms, such as towers and bridges, then carefully indexed and photographed. This process results in a triadic mode of representation that recalls Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), in which the conceptual artist presented a chair, a photograph of the chair and a dictionary definition of the word “chair” to explore the relationship between object, image and language. Yet in Kantürk’s case, the focus lies on the fragile existence of collections – constantly relocated, dispersed or threatened with disappearance. The act of indexing reminds us that even if the physical books disappear, they remain present – a record of the titles preserves both the idea of the collection and its potential to be reassembled elsewhere.

Another focal point of the exhibition is a section dedicated to football drawings, a series Kantürk has been developing for more than two decades, based on real events covered by the media. These works trace the history and politics of the sport, evoking moments of solidarity, resistance and protest against labour injustice, homophobia and racial discrimination. For the artist, football is not only about the game but also about the collective energy it generates, as he puts it: “This sense of unity, this social belonging and synergy, if harnessed positively, can create an incredible powerful impact – not just in football, but in all public spheres.”

The title “In the deathcar, we are alive” not only alludes to life as a one-way ride to death but also evokes the entire metaphorical sphere of the phrase: living in and surviving an era of corruption, adversity, polarisation and the erosion of human rights, both in the artist’s homeland and across the world. A sense of loneliness permeates many works, as if a sole survivor is chronicling a daily life clinging to hope or as if the sheer scale of the disaster and decay makes it inexplicable to share; however; this isolation is juxtaposed with, and at times answered by, a profound sense of solidarity and unity that emerges in others.

[1] Jake Horton & William Armstrong: Turkey earthquake: Why did so many buildings collapse?, BBC Reality Check & BBC Monitoring, 9 February 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/64568826 

*From the song In the Deathcar (Goran Bregović & Iggy Pop, Arizona Dream soundtrack, 1993)

Özge Ersoy, 2012  

This interview was first published in the catalogue of the FULL Art Prize 2012

http://m-est.org/2012/12/03/collectors-do-not-grow-weary-of-the-search/

Borga Kantürk, an artist whose practice is frequently based on diaristic responses to and recordings of what he is exposed to, for me, represents a spontaneity, a responsiveness, which situate the works in that particular transformation of the familiar. In other words, I’m drawn to how Borga alters what I know by employing different media and methodologies. In this conversation with Özge, the two trace Borga’s interests, curiosities, and references through looking at Borga’s work within the framework of his exhibitions and projects, varying in space and scope, with an emphasis on the conceptual and visual connections.—Merve Ünsal

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Özge Ersoy: Borga, I’d like to start with a question about your drawings. In your recent works, you depart from photos, digital visuals, and newspaper clippings that you have found and collected. At the center of the installation The Other Zidane are your drawings about the soccer player Djemal Zidane, who played in the Algerian National Team in the 1980s. For Close Ranks (2009-2011) you drew players, uniforms, and banners that reflect the resistance and struggle documented on the fields and grandstands. In Jot this Down Too (2012), you portrayed Hrant Dink in red, Lefter Küçükandonyadis in blue, and used black for Festus Okey, who was murdered with a shot in the neck at the Beyoğlu Police Station. It is possible to say that you intervened with and recreated, thus personalized these documents you collected for these works. On the one hand, you seem to acknowledge these figures who are the subject of  your drawings. On the other hand, you might be creating your own unique expression by opting for manual and slow production. Could you talk about the relationship you’ve established with your drawings? Does this relation differ among the aforementioned works?

Borga Kantürk: For me, to draw is to feel an affinity with the person or event I’m addressing, to have empathy towards them. I started to produce with this rationale in 2008. I must say that the fact my practice sways between being a curator and an artist is closely related to this mode of production. On the one hand, I am motivated by the operative practice of curatorship to conduct research on oral history and undocumented phenomena and create an archive. On the other hand, through my identity as an artist, I am interested in conveying this archive to the audience by assuming the role of a witness or narrator. What I want to do as an artist is to tackle the situations and processes that I feel close to and to blur their boundaries. I think pen and paper are the most simple and humane tools of keeping a record. I can say that instead of being a writer who takes notes, records and interprets things, I prefer documenting via drawings.

I’ve had this fixation with documenting since 2001–2002. Earlier, I used to reproduce my own documents; by painting, drawing or penciling over them. I started this process by manually documenting the banner of one of my exhibits. Later I decided to use carbon paper. I was interested in leaving a trace while being unable to see the transformation of the original. I produced diaries with this rationale. These days I’m pondering over how these traces relate to the status quo, the state and the wheels of bureaucracy. How is historical memory recorded, how does it get lost or left unrecorded? Carbon paper is a symbol of the status quo. The colors red, blue and black also take on a significance here. I’m interested in how these three colors—that are used in government offices—are representative of the official space and ideology; they relate to pens, stamp-seals, and carbon paper.

ÖE: By employing the drawing technique you are also questioning the idea of authorship. It seems as though you are concerned with resisting the urge to produce a brand new creation; you’re attempting to establish more subtle, intellectual links.

BK: My ideas on drawing were shaped at the Helsinki Artist Residency Program I participated in 2005. In that period I was drawing every day. My drawings thus transformed into an action, into a series of traces. I was trying to emphasize the process, the whole that progressed day by day. For me, it is also an interrogation into the idea of belonging. However, the sense of producing a singular and unique creation is not a matter in question here. It is closer in stand to On Kawara’s works which mark the actual day that is lived and gone.
 

Borges has an anthology/archive titled The Library of Babel. This project compiles a selection of short stories, and in a sense, signifies Borges, expresses his view. Actually we already know most of the stories included in this book. There is Poe, Melville… What I find exciting here is the question of why Borges wanted to create this route, this state of togetherness, and present it to us as such a whole. Here there is the guidance of someone who makes and interprets signs and follows the traces. This is a dedicated effort to transform all these little narratives from different times into a series within a certain time frame and space. Based on this, I am constructing for myself the model of an artist who edits, compiles, archives, bears witness, preserves, saves and shares that which s/he has saved.

ÖE: You often place your drawings in a space. The drawings in The Other Zidane (Revenge of Zidane) are exhibited on custom-made wallpaper, before the plastic chairs you painted in red, green, and white. In Close Ranks, the arrangement of the drawings is reminiscent of the form of the sun; and in previous installations they appear together with a neon sign that reads “um coracao, um corpo, um sol” (one heart, one body, one sun)—in reference to the Brazilian soccer player Socrates. In other words, instead of exhibiting the drawings on their own, you construct them as parts of installations. Could you talk about how you construct this relationship? By creating this connection, do you emphasize your personal relationship to documents?

BK: My concern is to create an atmosphere. The exhibition space is ultimately a living area. Especially if you are including the exterior space in this construction, in this work… In any case one can’t deny that this exterior is a space with memory, the public nature of which is experienced beyond one’s intervention. The notion of creating a private sphere like a room or atmosphere is inherent in works intended as books or diaries as well. The book is a process with a beginning and end, there is a volume suffused by this process; the structure is shaped accordingly. The book’s relation to that which is public starts to be shaped in the café or the library where it contacts the public. These drawings are sometimes construed to become a book and sometimes as a spatial installation. Here, I can also refer to my curatorial works. The KUTU Portable Art Gallery that I started in 2002 was also concerned with creating a space of its own and later adapting that area to another space. My desire was to exhibit artworks inside, to create a safe space, a designated area for the artist’s works and expressions, and therefore to provide a sort of isolation. As for the artist, KUTU was based on a notion like creating “a room of one’s own.”

Also in my installations I feel the need to create a buffer zone with meticulously drawn and marked boundaries—similar to a stage or a section in a museum. In such a structure, these productions have a documentary nature and are also subjected to personal intervention; they exist in so far as they point to an event or a situation, either on their own or as depicted in newspapers. Let’s consider an archive or a corpus: They are more distant to being pieces of a whole; they are dissociated and singular. They have been detached from the temporal sequence; they have transformed from a single historical reality into a kind of reminiscence, a remembrance that recalls ambiguity. I prefer the presentation of these productions within a unifying atmosphere. The curatorial and editorial aspect of the work becomes effectual at this point.

ÖE: Let’s go back to your urge to collect and archive. Considering the scope and sobriety of your research, one can say that you use a documentary approach. Despite your meticulous archiving that resembles that of a social scientist, the fact that you refrain from didacticism is quite apparent. How does your relationship with documents alter in different stages of the collection process? When do you decide to take a break from collecting and intervene? What aspects are most crucial for you to emphasize in your intervention?

BK: In my work, I emphasize the process. Thus, scattered and multipartite constructs may emerge out of my works. I’ve been interested in the notion of collecting since childhood. I’ve collected various objects at different times, like sticker books, tapes, music albums, and exhibition invites. I want to highlight the way in which these objects relate to memory and the ever-changing process of collecting. I start to work on the transformation of this process into constructs to be exhibited only when the state of collecting and research exhausts me and I’m crammed with the objects and documents I’ve found. I can liken this state to that of the crammed secondhand stores where objects lose their visibility. It is when my mind, hard disk, and desk reach the point of overflowing that I want to stop collecting, reduce the articles and intervene. Collectors do not grow weary of the search; they cannot help but orient their instincts towards what they want to find and get covered up in dust as they do so. I also have moments when I say “OK, it’s done” or “come on, that’s it, we are doing the exhibition.” Thus I can’t say that I’m exhibiting a completed transmission, artwork or visual product. My priority lies with emphasizing the research process and presenting various records and interpretations driven from it. I’m perhaps playing with it because I’m bored with the dry and absolute state of a historical document devoid of a story.

ÖE: Here I recall your collection of visual materials on the state of traveling. Your work titled Travel Log (2011) combines the photos you took in İzmir with the associative texts of a writer who used to live in this city. Your “Café Recordis”(2011) exhibition held in Gallery NON makes reference to ships and sea shores while dealing  with the actions of waiting and wandering. Both works make me think of the links between environmental and personal transformations. How do the concepts of belonging, reminiscence, nostalgia, and the state of traveling link to one another in these works for you?

BK: This is a state of restless wandering. I associate it with certain examples in literature. Upon Fatih Özgüven’s advice I started reading Antonio Tabucchi; and I can say that the spiritual and physical state of wandering that I’ve read there has a connection with my works. Just like in Melih Cevdet Anday’s poem “The Disturbed Tree” or in İlhan Berk’s “Yesterday I Took to the Hills, I Was Not Home”, I am questioning the act of setting off on the road with a heavy heart caught between dreams and reality. As one wanders, history and time continue their flow; and one continues to bear witness. It is also possible to read this condition as a sociological excavation or mental archeology. A social and ideological comparison between the past and current events reinforces this state of chagrin. I feel increasingly anachronistic, as if I live in the wrong age or I am the wrong person; that I’ve been unable to keep up with the social, urban, and many other transformations; that I’ve been cut off from communication and have become restless as a result. My works thus emerge as the product of such a mind-state.

ÖE: Finally let’s touch upon your recent exhibition titled “The Sick and the Building” (2012). This time you approach personal transformations from a different angle; memory and nostalgia are replaced with uniformity, apathy, and timelessness. Do you think you look at the relationship between the individual and the space in a different way?

BK: My previous exhibition “Café Recordis” coincided with my return from military service; it emerged as the reflection of a mind-state focused on wandering with the past and memory, motion as well as emancipation. It was a retrospective journey into a spiritual past and also a journey showing that I can pace, that I can move. There were interspaces like the harbor, the seashore, and the street.

“The Sick and the Building” is more about returning after a bit of wandering and closure. It focuses specifically on the concept of time and processes whereby the relationship between time and human spirit gets interwoven with the workings of bureaucracy and public buildings. I am interested in the conflict between institutional time that seems almost static, and personal time buried in routine going on for years on end as if it has no end or no beginning, and then just wasting away. This is also related to the sense of living over and over again (like it was just yesterday), having lost the knowledge of which day you started doing the same things. This exhibition can also be viewed as a self-portrait; because it looks at the space and the person within that space. It throws a wink at literature and cinema dealing with such themes of haunted houses and labyrinths, while at the same time playing with links between modernity and institutionalization. Here is a more condensed and gloomy state of entanglement. I think this exhibition is focused on the idea of wandering in a place with its perimeters woven in a systematic web and where the slow flow of time is killed; and putting up resistance by looking for a way out.

Borga Kantürk is an artist based in Izmir. 

Didem Yazici, 2011

In his current solo exhibition, Borga Kantürk attempts to produce a new space in the art gallery through objects such as photo-print on wood, and mini portable slide projector. All the objects in the show are well-selected in order to reminisce a cafe construct. Anyone who likes to testify the changes in histories of spaces and anyone who likes to be  caught up by yesterday and 70s spirit should see the exhibition.

The objects in the exhibition evokes nostalgic images such as an old film scene, or a song that you remember the melody but never the lyrics, or a memory of an old vacation to a little seaside town.This nostalgia here, refers to urban transformation and historical consciousness with undidactic way. Rather than an art gallery, it makes the audience feel like they are in a cafe.

The Exhibition is open for an emphaty, and there is no clear end to it. I consider the exhibition as a process in itself. I avoided the art works to have a definite message. Well, there is a conception but it is related with effort for creation. The atmosphere of the cafe is relevant to questions such as “why do you go to a cafe? What is the reason to go to a cafe?” When you go to a cafe by yourself, probably you like to remember that place or you are attached to it, or you like to concentrate on something, or you might also let yourself go.. At that point, it is almost impossible to get any solution, you just spend some time there and you simply feel peaceful just to be there. Even though, you cannot find the receipt for your peace, you stil keep going to that cafe. I wanted to lead the exhibition audience to these feelings together with myself. I do not know the end, it is an on going process and the traces here are part of this process.

Your works have a sort of serious researcher sense and documentarism; on the other hand there is a humour when you’re reproducing an object or a situation. Can you talk about this contrast, how does it function?

Documentarism and record keeping is connected to discover my obsession of collecting. In first place, I discovered it when I was curating and I used it; later on I also started to use it form my own art practise. The humour there is not a fictional one. That is to say, there is no social gestures or any overturning taboos. I love the humorous situations as in Woodt Allen’s films: It is never so obvious but it makes you smile. I want to make people feel like ‘I am aware, but stil I keep doing it silence – to live, to survive, to be cared and etc.

You choose to desing the invitation as a part of the exhibition. Can you talk about that?

Invitation refers to ‘Cafe Recordis’, I designed it as a coaster. My dream is to see this art works to be installed in a new  bar, cafe or a pub.

Your approach to the concept of ‘nostaljia’ seems to be the main decisive and motivation.

It is a little bit about getting capitalized..  to lose the sense of handing, I mean literally. For instance, an object for music: you can handle and touch the cassette; but with mp3 file it is impossible. In that case, there is no object, just consume and leave. There is no real effort there.

Mp3 has meanings and efforts in its own right fort he next generation.

What exactly concerns me here is the loss of object whic is not common in Europe for instance. In The Balkans or Dubai, it functions same as here. It is not possible to g oto a cafe from 1940s. Well, when you go to the place just after a year, you encounter a totally different content within the same place. In regards to this, the exhibition is about making a claim to your memory.

The exhibition is open till June 4th, 2011 in Gallery NON, İstanbul.