Common Grounds: Remembering what remains

SAHA Studio 11th Term artists held regular meetings with independent curator Nikolaos Akritidis, this year’s guest of the Visiting Curator Program initiated in 2021 by SAHA and ARTWORKS (Athens). Akritidis’s reflections from his meetings with the artists during his six-week stay in Istanbul are presented to visitors as a text within SAHA Studio Open:

"When I first met the residents in their studios, I was struck by a shared sensibility in their approach to spatial thinking. Each practice is grounded in observation, listening, and testing, while making use of a range of items encountered during this period. Given that the studios are sites for material experimentation, the residents were brought together to allow generative conversations to unfold alongside their work. During our discussions on subjects ranging from cultural memory to the tensions between private and public spheres, deep resonances became apparent between their practices.

They share an interest in residue: what remains after a sound fades, a protest disperses, a performance ends, or a building disappears. Space is understood not as a neutral container, but as something that remembers, resists, and accumulates traces over time. The SAHA Studio program offers a valuable set of conditions: time, proximity, and an environment shaped equally by artistic practice and by the everyday economies of İMÇ. For artists coming from backgrounds including architecture, sound studies, and performance, it functions as a space of negotiation and reflection. Transitions between individual studio time and shared conversations, as well as common visits, contributed to the development of a collective sensibility. Each artist was preoccupied with a distinct focus, while being aware of others navigating similar uncertainties and methodological questions within the same cultural calendar. The SAHA Studio Open presents artworks which reflect this balance between individual concentration and collective presence.

Neval Tarım’s work focuses on sound and sculptural installation, reconstructing the memory of a wooden house that no longer exists: Tahir Bey Mansion in Üsküdar, where her father's family once lived. Ash Diaries delves into the history of this konak, which burned down five decades ago due to a stove pipe that was too short, by paying careful attention to oral histories, material reverberations, and gaps in recollection. Stove pipe sculptures act as both reference and instrument, carrying multichannel sound compositions that trace movement, warmth, and loss, alternating between the clear recollections of past residents and hazier memories. The installation behaves at once like a house with different rooms, a fragment, and an enlarged detail, shifting scales in response to the workings of memory. Sound becomes a carrier of plural, unstable, and living spatial recollections.

Can Memişoğulları approaches İMÇ itself as a site of haunting. Working with sound devices, projections, and moving image, his practice lends an ear to the modernist building's musical histories while also highlighting unexpected symbiotic relationships. Shaped by two intertwined projects, his work follows the logic of İMÇ’s circulation, attending to both present relations and cultural residues from the past. In Ghosts of İMÇ, sound functions as a way of summoning the voices that populated the site’s relationship with the music industry, extending beyond the walls of the studio and into the corridors. Strategies for the Endurance of Things consists of an interactive digital installation that captures serendipitous 'collaborations' spread around İMÇ, such as an air conditioning unit drip feeding a plant with water. Here, the building is animated as a multilayered, living archive where echoes, ghosts, and environmental rhythms overlap.

Suat Öğüt’s work engages with the city as an urban palimpsest shaped by resistance, erasure, and collective voice. Through mosaics, LED panels, metal structures, and archival imagery, Echoes of Silent Hums assembles frozen moments drawn from protests and public gatherings. The process of making these works, marked by material challenges and physical labor, becomes inseparable from their conceptual framework. Surfaces appear layered, damaged, and rewritten, foregrounding urban space as a dense and charged condition. Creating mosaics with glass tiles is a process which necessitates close attention to detail, spending ample time recreating each mark of past frictions. These works may not feature sound, yet they loudly insist that the commons are inherently fragile and negotiated daily, carried by bodies that leave traces of collective action.

Gizem Ünlü’s presentation departs from observations of the surrounding area and its political landscape, as well as objects that were encountered during the residency which feature in her work as traces of psychological and bodily states. Videos, installations, and sculptural fragments are created through repetitive gestures that include scraping, cutting, covering, and erasing, registering an inability to intervene and a desire to redirect the gaze inward. Gizem’s work introduces a tense membrane where inside and outside continually exchange places while negotiating intimacy and distance. The found objects, which include a skull, bones, and a knife, remain ambiguous despite carrying the menace of violence, allowing meaning to emerge through proximity. They invoke the presence of certain figures, such as the smoker, the hunter, and the butcher.

Mk Yurttaş proposes UNVEIL, a presentation resulting from a collection of actions that understand performance as both method and remnants. Their residency began with an interest in archival research and live art, drawing from SAHA's Annual Reports, which then evolved into a sustained engagement with material experimentation, gravity, instability, and collective action. Everyday objects such as chairs, poles, fabrics, and ladders are assembled and dismantled through a series of performances that embrace limitation and failure as productive conditions to create art. These actions culminate in a group performance which will take place outside of the studio, bringing awareness to bodily presence and creating a temporary liminal space in the corridors of İMÇ. It is aligned with Mk’s proposition of performance as a posthuman methodology in which an entanglement of bodies, objects, and environments allows agency to be negotiated and distributed.

The works encountered in this presentation share an orientation toward space as something lived and shaped by relations. İMÇ is not simply a backdrop for the works; it has been an active participant and collaborator through its architecture, economies, and temporal structures, situating these artistic practices within the realities of the local area. As this round of residencies concludes, we are invited to consider how artistic practice unfolds alongside daily encounters. The SAHA Studio Open marks a moment of visibility within ongoing artistic, spatial, and social processes that continue unfolding beyond the studio walls."

Nikolaos Akritidis