26 KM

July 2023 - June 2024
ŞANLIURFA
Project contributors

Aşkın Ercan (artist-academician)
Mahmut Karaçizmeli (architect-academician)
Binnaz Koca (artist-academician)
Filiz Selvi (artist-educator)

The 26-km route subject to the project, originating from the Karaköprü district of Şanlıurfa and currently constituting the boundary of the built environment with regard to its material physical boundaries, stretches all the way to the university campus known as Osmanbey, which has been isolated from the city center.

Karaköprü district is an area, former suburbs of which is mostly settled by the city’s bourgeoisie, a class particularly created as a result of the neoliberal policies of the last 20 years. Upon setting off from this boundary to cover the mentioned 26 kilometers, parcels of nostalgic agricultural land can occasionally be seen throughout the way. Beginning in the Karaköprü district through the Şanlıurfa-Diyarbakır route, the road intersects with the road which connects the Diyarbakır-Mardin routes in transit, which intersection is named the Buluntu Hoca Boulevard. The most important characteristic of the road, which was built to ease the traffic load in Şanlıurfa city center, is that it presents us with heterotopic, cultural, archeological, political and ecologic references throughout. Along the road, there is a concrete plant established amidst agricultural fields, an abandoned Armenian church, cave homes subject to myths, a machinery factory, the Göbeklitepe crossroad, a hippodrome, “Kısas” (an Alevite village), police control points and boundary signs of the city. With single-storey residences, one side of the road exhibits the rural area, while the other side exhibits the urban silhouette. It is ambiguous where rural ends and urban begins. Whereas during the earthquake, the road provided a way to safety for the city residents. Harran University is the last stop, surrounded by preserved agricultural fields.

Through the 26 kilometers that include the significant crossroads of the city, the project suggests re-contemplation on the following topics:

Fate of the displayable cultural assets alongside the road and loss of value in terms of cultural heritage and identity,
Loss of memory,
Checking and bringing forward urban memory through myths and symbols,
Parties who will directly and indirectly impacted in the urban-rural relations, through the ecologic indicators of social memory,
The party/parties whose will enabled implementation of the principle of voluntariness of change-transformation,
The future of the road,
The necessity for a new and productive analysis through art, establishing a new way of dialogue and preserve the memory.

The project will seek answers for the above questions through various artistic media, with the participation of 4 contributors in 12 months.

Yeliz Selvi Gölpunar

Born in Ankara in 1983. She completed her undergraduate degree in the Painting Department of the Fine Arts Faculty of Mersin University in 2005. She completed her graduate degree at the same university in 2008 and received her Doctor of Arts degree from Painting Department of the Fine Arts Faculty of Gazi University with her thesis “Visual Analyses on Heterotopia.”

In her work, she generally follows all interdisciplinary and current art forms, reads on new and current concepts against post-human age artistic developments, with a particular interest on all kinds of visual representation of figurative language. Her artistic work exhibits a phenomenon of the aforementioned combination. With belief in the existence of an alternative and unique memory, the most striking features of her works are excessive/excess (gender forms, costumed people, fruits, etc.) and exploited images within a mundane reality (the nature and organic images that belong to the nature). These images, which are in the reality space, have incomprehensible aspects, with an emphasis on the location they are ontologically in. At the same time, they are pathologic in the sense that they constitute a traumatic excess and memory reflected on the reality perceived by the looking eye. On the other hand, they exhibit a humorous character as they reflect poetic irrationalities from certain perspectives. She continues her artistic works within such conceptual framework, both domestically and abroad.

Connections:

www.instagram.com/yelizselvii

This page is published on 7 December 2023.