Helter-Skelter

Palas Pandıras [Helter-Skelter]: A Decade of Desen Halıçınarlı’s Work

The city we live in changes and transforms every day. Encircled by excavation trucks and veiled in dust clouds, the view from our windows—whether from above or below, inside or out—shifts constantly. Istanbul’s urban fabric seems to be in perpetual metamorphosis, shedding its skin repeatedly. Amid endless gentrification, we barely recognize our own streets. For many of us, even the notion of calling a place “home” has become tenuous, if not impossible. Desen Halıçınarlı, an artist whose work has long been intertwined with the city, delves into Istanbul’s urban imagery and its ceaseless flux. After attending a fine arts high school in Izmir, she moved to Istanbul in 2001 to study painting at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. Captivated by the historic fabric of the city, she began to depict centuries-old buildings in neighbourhoods like Beyoğlu, Galata, and Karaköy in her paintings and engravings. The urban landscape she saw when looking out of her window or up at the sky has shaped her practice since the early 2000s, evolving alongside Istanbul’s own transformation.

In his book The Image of the City, urban planner Kevin Lynch argues that the city offers more than the eye can see or the ear can hear. Many of its hidden scenes and forgotten corners, he notes, cannot be experienced spontaneously. Similarly, Joachim Sartorius, a diplomat and poet enamoured with Istanbul, describes İstanbul as the city most rich in memories—and most adept at forgetting within all cities:

Here, one can learn much about the art of remembering and forgetting. I’m not just referring to Antiquity and the graceful decay of it, Byzantium, the fractured New Rome, or the imamah-shaped gravestones that have now acquired an artistic beauty. I feel this even more strongly in the “younger” neighbourhoods, like Beyoğlu, on the Pera side, Istanbul’s cosmopolitan, multilingual quarter in the 1930s and 40s. Beyoğlu, with its decline from its former glory, its caryatids bear the weight of their decay, and apartment entrances with Greek, Arabic and French inscriptions, remains my favourite district.

This “graceful decay” of memory spaces plays a prominent role in Halıçınarlı’s work. Exploring the city on foot, much like a modern-day “flâneuse”, she stumbled upon places such as the Terra Santa Spanish Hospital an Chapel, guided by a caretaker; the Beyoğlu Municipality building, a site of political conflict throughout its history; and the Nimet Han building near the French Passage in Karaköy, where her studio was located between 2011 and 2022. Learning from a Belarusian tourist who accidentally climbed onto the roof that her studio had once been a monk’s room, Halıçınarlı felt herself immersed in a surreal and mystical landscape. Four onion-domed Russian churches that attract the gaze from the roofs of various buildings become the subject of Halıçınarlı’s research and appear in her paintings. 

Urban planner and writer Kevin Lynch suggests that living in a city is, in essence, living within an image—a notion we often overlook:

Streets, boulevards, historic buildings, and grand bridges of that city coalesce into a singular impression. Moreover the perception of a city shifts over time and from person to person. Probably the only thing that can be argued to be the same are the questions that come to mind: What does the structure of a bustling city truly signify? The image we have of the city we live in is the product of which sensitivity? Is it possible to lose oneself in the same place twice? Can a city’s history parallel our personal history?

How, then, do we gaze upon the city? Are we looking outward from within, casting our eyes from the safety of home to the building across the street? In fact, the direction of the gaze may vary from city to city and even from neighbourhood to neighbourhood; especially when walking in the old districts of Istanbul, we sometimes feel the need to look up. In Halıçınarlı’s work, the act of looking is plural and multifaceted. Her art urges us to look upward, to peek into hidden corners, to remain open to the subtleties and serendipities of the urban fabric.

The exhibition “Palas Pandıras” features oil paintings on canvas, engravings, and even the printing plates left behind from the engraving process. For Halıçınarlı, who studied both painting and engraving simultaneously at Mimar Sinan University, carving and engraving are rooted in relief-like actions. From the beginning of her practice, she has worked in a “two-and-a-half-dimensional” space between two- and three-dimension where engraving played a pivotal role in shaping her three-dimensional thinking. Since 2017, she has focused on reshaping discarded objects—items she describes as “not trash, but abandoned by their owners, treated as if they were trash.” One of the most striking examples is her Kent Çöpleri[“Urban Debris”] series, initiated with a three-dimensional installation created from the old electrical fuse box of Nimet Han. This piece, now included in the exhibition, makes its debut with this show.

During the pandemic, Halıçınarlı began her “Yuvam neresi” [“Where Is My Home”] series, inspired by the “dodecahedron”—a twelve-faced geometric form with equal pentagonal sides. To the artist, these geometric forms suggest that a home is more than just a physical space; it is an intricate layering of thoughts, memories, and emotions. Her paintings often feature winged creatures like storks and roosters, which she explains as follows: “Birds exist between two worlds, both in the sky and on the ground. They fly and they perch. I think that’s why I include them in my paintings.”

Two paintings in the exhibition, Heterotopya [“Heterotopia”]Iand Heterotopya II, borrow their title from Michel Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia.” Created over a year (2017–2018), these works traverse multiple spaces and times, hovering between the real and the imagined. In her paintings Heterotopia Iand Heterotopia II, there is a spatial, hybrid and heterogeneous construction that relates to the concept of heterotopia. Halıçınarlı’s layered compositions capture the boundaries of power that emerge from the physical, topographical, and social norms of the city. These boundaries are not sharply demarcated, but are organic and chaotic. While her works offer aerial views of the Bosphorus, the urban grid does not align with reality. Even if the buildings or events are not in their right places on the map, we can feel some of the events that the city has witnessed. Halıçınarlı’s signature use of electric wires weaves these elements together, connecting homes and themes.

The exhibition “Palas Pandıras” is an invitation to examine the transformation of Halıçınarlı’s practice, the path she has travelled and what she has added to her production, and at the same time a call to look at the city we live in with more observant eyes.

 

Nergis Abıyeva

Translation: Oğuz Karayemiş

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