Always Remember Me Like This, 2022

Commissioned by Hilton Istanbul Bosphorus, Always Remember Me Like This emerged from an invitation to work with the hotel's photographic archive. Rather than approaching the archive as a fixed repository of historical evidence, I understood it as a living structure capable of producing new relationships, meanings, and temporalities.
 

The project is based on a collection of portraits made between the 1950s and 1980s. I physically intervene in these photographs by removing figures from their original compositions, reconstructing the resulting absences with fragments taken from other archival images, and scanning these new compositions to produce another photographic surface. Instead of restoring what has been removed, this process creates encounters between bodies, places, and moments that never originally existed together.
 

Scanning is not used as a method of reproduction but as a way of making photographs again. It records the physical traces of cutting, layering, shadows, and depth, allowing the archive to become a space of continuous image making rather than preservation. The logic of double exposure is translated into a material process in which different histories and temporalities coexist within a single image.
 

This way of thinking also shaped the installation. I chose to present the works outdoors on perforated fabric because I was interested in how an archive might exist beyond the walls that traditionally contain it. The transparency of the material, together with the movement of light, air, weather, and visitors, allowed the photographs to remain in dialogue with their surroundings. Rather than treating the archive as a closed place that protects the past, the installation imagines it as something open, permeable, and capable of extending into public space through the continued circulation of images.

The installation was presented in the garden of Hilton Istanbul Bosphorus as part of the 17th edition of Contemporary Istanbul art fair.