As part of the “Past.Present.Istanbul” exhibition at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, a 2-piece oil painting installation about the Vitaspirit accident that took place in the Bosphorus in 2018, resulting in the destruction of the Hekimbaşı Salih Efendi Mansion.
My installation “Vitaspirit”, which I have encoded as a metaphor for the change-transformation process dictated to the inhabitants of the city of Istanbul, depicted the view of the 225-meter Vitaspirit cargo ship, which lacks maneuverability, coming towards the mansion, with its structure just before the destruction of the Hekimbaşı Salih Efendi Mansion, which I named “Resident”. I tried to create a space where the audience can experience the ‘spirit of time’ and the vulnerability in front of it, provided that it leaves the audience right in the middle of the moment of tension.

«…there is a relatively small-scale painting of the mansion and right across from it is a painting of the ship that is seen from slightly above eye level. A space is imagined between the two paintings and this space is designated for the meandering of the view in addition to the viewer looking at both paintings, the position of the viewer is partially fixed at this moment. The moment is a key notion in this work. The moment if we are to claim that this moment refers to a temporality is an in- between field, positioning the viewer between two images, right before the accident that is to take place. This critical moment triggers a fluidity in the representations of the two images, despite the massive volume of Vitaspirit, the name of which is based on the word vita, meaning life in Latin, as the roles of perpetrator and victim blend into each other. “

Quoted from Cağrı Saray’s Scenography of the Inevitable text that takes part in Past.Present.Istanbul Exhibition Catalog (p.40)