Artwork

City no.61: Istanbul

2026

Medium

Mix Media

Artist

selcen karatay

Turkey

About the work

Istanbul is part of City, an ongoing series exploring how cities remain in memory rather than how they objectively appear. Istanbul itself is a dense and layered city, shaped by centuries of different histories, cultures and ways of living. It is also a place of crossings, unexpected encounters, shifting routes and connections, where getting slightly lost can become part of how the city is experienced. The work began from recollection rather than a map, allowing the city to emerge through density, rhythm and what remained most vivid. As the image developed, different parts of Istanbul began to overlap almost on their own. The Bosphorus and Golden Horn collapsed into the same dividing and connecting line; Galata, the Maiden’s Tower, Fener-Balat and waterfront houses appeared within the same compressed field, while the Valens Aqueduct runs across the lower part of the work in thread. This was not planned in advance, but emerged from the way the city had been retained in memory. Typewritten fragments within the central space come from the artist’s screenplay for Dear Leon, a film project in which a character’s inner life and personal memory intersect with Istanbul’s own layered history and memory. Its dense surface reflects that process: not a geographically accurate Istanbul, but the version that remained.