Photography

Documenting spaces as they change, or as they are being made.

Documentary work made alongside research — in Istanbul's passages, and in an exhibition space in Freiburg.

Arkad project banner: the wordmark “arkad” and the line “interactive arcade project of pera” over a sepia archival photograph of a crowded Pera street, arcaded shopfronts on the left and painted signs above the road.

Arkad — Mapping Istanbul's Passages

İSTANBUL, TR · 2021—2023

Between 2021 and 2023, I documented the historic passages (pasajlar) and commercial buildings (hanlar) of Beyoğlu, Istanbul, creating an interactive archive of urban transformation as part of an ERC-funded research project.

Arkad was more than a photography project. It was an ethnographic investigation into how economic crisis, political polarization, migration, demographic shifts, and the pandemic were reshaping one of Istanbul's most culturally significant districts.

Beyoğlu's passages, once vibrant commercial and social spaces, were closing, being repurposed, or reduced to mere shortcuts. Each disappearance erased a piece of the city's memory. Through fieldwork, archival research, and original photography, I mapped these spaces.

A long empty passage lined with shuttered shopfronts and frosted glass, lit by a coffered skylight at the near end, receding to a doorway of pale daylight. A dim passage with a chequered marble floor and empty shopfronts, lit by strip lights, with a band of coloured stained glass above the far doorway opening onto a graffitied street. Looking up into a ribbed glass dome above peeling ochre walls, with two dark statues set into niches on either side. An upper gallery under a long barrel-vaulted glass roof, offices behind glazed partitions on the right, looking down to the arcade's arched entrance below. Weathered stone facade seen from above, with three dark female statues standing on brackets between arched windows. A mannequin in a blue floral prayer dress stands between two shop windows papered with black-and-white photographs of construction workers on a girder above a city. Looking up a dark stairwell through several floors of wrought-iron balustrades, with strip lights and daylight from a window at the top.

Research context

Conducted as part of the ERC Starting Grant-funded project “Staging National Abjection” at Kadir Has University (2021–2022), where I served as research assistant. The project examined how urban infrastructure reflects and reinforces social and political exclusions.

Method

I combined systematic documentation with archival investigation, photographing each passage's current state while researching its historical evolution. The resulting interactive map integrated visual, spatial, and narrative data, creating a digital archive accessible to researchers, residents, and anyone interested in Istanbul's urban memory.

Why passages matter

Passages are indicators of urban change. Their transformation or disappearance reveals dynamics of gentrification, displacement, economic pressure, and shifting cultural identity. By documenting them, Arkad preserves evidence of a city in flux and the communities being erased in the process.

Liminal Fields — REGIONALE 23

E-WERK FREIBURG, DE

The Regionale is an annual group exhibition developed in the context of a cross-border cooperation of 18 institutions in Germany, France and Switzerland with a focus on local, contemporary art production in the three-country region around Basel.

With Liminal Fields, the three artists create a world of dissolution and transition. Instead of walls and fences, poles and thresholds serve as orientation. Boundaries are not abolished, but they become permeable and softened. Instead of dualism, continuity prevails. The result is a sphere of processuality, of transitions, an aesthetic and social field of experimentation that invites visitors to linger, contemplate, play and interact.

Artists
Paula Mierzowsky, Michael Gärtner and Johann Diel
Photos
Berk Alkoç
Exhibition
REGIONALE 23 — E-Werk Freiburg, Germany
A dark room lined with deep pile fur, lit red from within by glowing hollows in the surface, with two thin illuminated ledges and a slim pole standing behind. A visitor in a long black coat steps through a gap in floor-to-ceiling pale green and white striped curtains into the dark space beyond. Two visitors lie back in the red-lit fur landscape, resting against its glowing hollows, while other people stand at the edge in the dark. A black vitrine table with a glass top standing in front of pale green curtains, holding ink drawings and a stack of printed sheets. Close view into the vitrine: ink drawings of creatures in loose brush lines, laid out in a grid under glass with soft curtain shadows falling across them. A narrow band of white light escapes between two hanging fur panels and reflects across the polished terracotta floor.