Neval Tarım

Neval Tarım is a transdisciplinary sound artist, sound designer, and educator. Her practice focuses on the interplay between sound, space, and perception. She combines spatial audio technologies with architectural approaches to create narratives that offer new ways of sensing and imagining space.

After earning her BA in Architecture from Istanbul Technical University (ITU), she completed a MA in Sonic Arts at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Music (ITU MIAM). Her work includes spatial sound compositions, site-specific installations, sound design for film, and immersive live performances, often shaped by soundscapes and experimental techniques. Beyond her artistic practice, Neval contributes to academia through workshops, seminars, and lectures, offering insights into sound production across architecture, urbanism, moving image, still image and music. 

Ash Diaries

Ash Diaries explores the re imagination of a family mansion that burned down approximately fifty years ago due to the shortness of a stove pipe, approaching its absence through sound, memory, and architecture.

The Tahir Paşa Mansion in Üsküdar was once the home of the artist’s father’s family. Today, its site contains a failed reconstruction garden and the urban transformed apartment building in which the artist was born. Childhood encounters with the mansion’s remaining stone foundations, combined over time with the changing image of the neighborhood and family narratives, have transformed the building from a physical structure into a layered, ghostly architecture.

The project’s research process begins with oral history interviews conducted with family elders, former tenants, and guests who once inhabited the mansion. In these conversations, memories unfold in uneven rhythms. At times they align, at times they contradict one another, and at times they fall abruptly silent. Moments of hesitation, attempts to recall the same detail simultaneously, gestures that complete what cannot be verbally articulated, as well as gaps and inconsistencies within the narratives, form the core field of inquiry. The artist continuously questions the extent to which these fragile accounts can be accurately perceived and translated.

Family photographs, architectural archival documents, neighborhood plans, and research into period specific building materials are brought together with the oral histories to construct a fragmented, unstable, and plural architectural imagination of the mansion. This imagined structure never resolves into a single correct space. Rather, it is approached as a site where multiple memories collide.

Within the studio, sound compositions unfold through a multi-channel installation, dispersed into the space via speakers concealed inside stove pipes. These pipes directly reference both the cause of the fire and the building’s destruction. Through their varying lengths, resonances, and cavities, each pipe produces a distinct auditory experience. The modular potential of the stove pipes becomes a tool for rethinking the spatial organization of the house as it persists in memory. Based on spatial cues drawn from the narratives, different modules were designed and arranged within the exhibition space to reconstruct the mansion’s units, relationships, and flows.

The sounds heard in the composition were developed by tracing the materials and objects described in the narratives as sound producing elements. The artist collected these recordings at İMÇ, in the dead-end street where the mansion once stood, and on the remaining wall fragments, using various microphones and recording devices. Since the original house no longer exists, its sounds are sought elsewhere. Sound thus becomes a method of inquiry, a means of following the traces of a lost structure.

As the installation reconstructs the mansion’s spatial memory in fragments, it shifts continually between scales. The modules behave like different units of the house. At times they suggest the whole, while at others they focus on a single architectural element, magnified in memory into an intensified detail. In this way, the structure exists simultaneously as a totality and as a fragment. Divided into two groups, the modules oscillate between warmer, clearly remembered moments and those that have been pushed into the unconscious and remain undefined.

Key elements of the house’s spatial memory, including the warmth of the sofa and salon, the rhythm of the stairs, the three level garden, three wells, the marble bathroom, and the basement remembered differently by everyone, are interwoven through sound, video, and spatial installation. As the house is primarily recalled through movement, the composition is organized along a circulation axis independent of floors.

Rather than reconstructing the lost building in a literal sense, Ash Diaries seeks to render perceptible its multiple voices, conflicting narratives, and gaps in memory. By transforming the repeatedly assembled, dismantled, and reemerging architecture of the house into a site of remembrance, the work proposes a museum of an unfinished home, one without a final form.