Helena Figueiredo, Max Schwarz, Mariami Kavtaradze, Janos Sträfer, Philipp Hofmann Mersedeh Sharifi, Uğur Kepenek, Maya Plötzer, Yeşim Akdeniz
This exhibition treats hosting as a question of use: how spaces, bodies, and histories are put to use, and how they might be re-used otherwise. Following Sara Ahmed’s reflections in What’s the Use?, Yeşim Akdeniz & Guests explores both the planned and imposed uses of space and the tactics through which people appropriate them. Spaces, the exhibition suggests, are never neutral: they are always oriented toward certain bodies, uses, and exclusions. İMÇ itself is a site of shifting uses—first trade, then music, now art—where the grooves of past labor open onto new orientations. Here, usefulness is redefined not as productivity but as the capacity to hold, to gather, to host.
Opened in the 1960s as a flagship of Turkey’s modernist architecture, the Manifaturacılar Çarşısı (İMÇ) was conceived as a rational grid of commerce. Over time, its passages, shops, and terraces have been reshaped through countless acts of improvisation: fabric partitions dividing shops, corridors repurposed as storage, courtyards adapted into gathering spots. Each new use reclaims the building in ways never intended. Drawing on Ahmed’s notion of “use”, the exhibition considers how spaces can be occupied otherwise: how functions shift, how places begin to hold new memories, and how modernist order is reworked through everyday acts of gathering and exchange.
For this exhibition the students of Yeşim Akdeniz from Art Academy Düsseldorf are invited to develop works that expand on the notion of hosting—treating it not only as a theme but as a way to rethink how space, relations, and display can be organized. At the same time, the exhibition itself will be approached as a temporary platform: a setting in which students can invite other groups from Istanbul, gather with them, and create moments of exchange and sharing.
The exhibition supported by SAHA and
