´Anybody There?´: New Exhibition at the Museum of Turkish Jews

Safigül Kurtyiğit is an artist whose one of primary goals is to emphasize the image of the city that is gradually being eradicated or destroyed, to trace the urban memory focusing on the places we live in and to protect the urban memory through the practices implemented. In this exhibition, she is trying to trace urban memory against memory loss by making visible the transformations and changes in the city, in order to remind the image of the city that has been erased from memories while changing rapidly.

Determining Ankara's Ulus district and surroundings as well as the Jewish Quarter as one of her preferred locations for visit, the artist tries to establish contact points with the neighborhood which welcomes her differently at every visit throughout her project duration, thus trying to form a bond and reflect these experiences in her art. In this framework, the exhibition 'Anybody There? (Orada Kimse Yok mu?)' has been prepared in five different layers. The first work was the collages, the second was drawings, the third was the manifest created by placing photos on the canvas, the fourth was the traces taken from the locations with ceramic clay and the last was the video-art work where the locations are recorded.

Due to the delayed intervention in the neighborhood, which had been included in the urban conservation area in 1980, more than fifty locations were either burned down or demolished thus not surviving until today. Most of those that survived were left to rot being left to their fate. To attract attention to this situation, the artist wanted to improve some places with paint.

'Anybody There? (Orada Kimse Yok mu?)' based on the concepts of urban memory and tracing the city, especially for the Jewish Quarter, is also archival in the aspect of its documentary quality. The aim of the study was to intensify the Jewish Quarter's place in the social memory, as it has a special place in the city's identity and contains historical and cultural elements in terms of urban memory.

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