GURBET

In Turkish, the word "gurbet" refers to the pain of forced exile. The term seemed fitting to describe those inhabitants who feel homesick within their very own city, Istanbul.

The ruling powers have been subjecting the city to a shock treatment of real estate Botox injections 'Made In Fantazised Empire': a chain reaction of commercial and religious acne. A metropolis aligning itself with the new global order of consumerism and conservatism. Like tungsten mushrooms, steel islands and mosque domes sprout at the pace of megaprojects.

​In that huge, transforming city, there is an entire parallel economy of the vanished; nostalgia is bartered everywhere. The city becomes a sprawling landfill of memory, governed by a past that refuses to pass, through which snakes a melancholic dark matter that contaminates people.

For an entire generation, the concentration of power and the muzzling of opposition for more than a decade have forced them to resign themselves to a culture of silence and this nostalgic dark matter.