Opening: Friday, February 13, 18:30

Uninterrupted is a body of work by artist Doğa Yirik; it intersects a family narrative with Turkey’s recent past. The artist documents the past activities of a leftist movement and the present lives of its former members, with a focus on the artist’s father, İbrahim Yirik, and unpacks a personal archive assembled by members, relatives, researchers, and witnesses. Raised in an environment mostly shielded from the politics of his forebears, the artist examines both the emotional residue of that political struggle and its toll on the family and their close friends. The exhibition sets out from a personal story within a significant yet scarcely documented circle in the lineage of the leftist movement in Turkey. It encompasses photographs, letters, and other memory artifacts, including zines and political literature; the selections from the archive are displayed in part as artworks and in part as research outputs.

Although the exhibition draws on a larger collection of oral history interviews, the only record on display is the artist’s unsuccessful interview with his grandmother, Kıymet Karakoç (1939-2023). At an advanced stage of dementia, she evades most questions, either unable to remember or finding the memories insignificant. I am Who I am (2022) is an attempt that came too late on preserving a fragment of the fading memory of Karakoç’s generation. It reveals not what she remembers but that which she has forgotten.

Doğa presents taxonomically diverse items from the archive with incompatible physical forms through an installation titled The Estate (2018-present). The work manifests as a physical assembly of objects inherited from the organization’s members, spanning both the artist’s biological kin and his chosen family. This collection comprises items charged with personal history, containing postcards, a ring, dried flowers, a sweater, telegrams, and a video camera.

Despite being a part of The Estate, a memory item exists as standalone work due to its content and audio format. Fly Free, Seagull (2024), is an originally untitled musical album recorded live by a rock trio in Bartın Prison in 1992. It consists of twelve tracks, featuring nine original songs composed during impromptu sessions while serving time.

​Uninterrupted bifurcates into even thinner canals as in Picnic (2025) which reconstructs the memory of İbrahim Özalp who acted as the managing publisher of the political zine Yolumuz (Our Way) and was a close friend of Doğa’s uncle Muzaffer Karakoç. Özalp’s only surviving photographs are coincidentally taken in an intimate Karakoç family event. These snapshots anchor a video work that navigates Doğa’s mother Müzeher Karakoç’s album while the artist tries to locate the traces of İbrahim’s fate through the accounts of surviving family members who witnessed that day.

Tık-Tık (2026) is a site-specific spatial installation with a sound component derived from an unpublished book by İbrahim Yirik, written while in prison. Transcriptions of the manuscript appear on the walls as translations of a rhythm-based code language used by prisoners to communicate through heating pipes.

Uninterrupted (2018–present), the exhibition’s title piece, serves as the linchpin that both illuminates and unifies every other component. Weaving together incidental footage deemed as “b-rolls” during the artist’s oral history interviews, the video lingers on the everyday lives of the artist’s father’s former comrades. Shifting its focus from their political past to their current routines, the artist documents a fading generation while attempting to reconcile his father’s history with his own identity.

Through diverse media, Uninterrupted attempts to bridge the gap between the untold history of Turkey’s leftist activists and the memory of one of their sons. By absorbing the emotional residue of subjects poised on the threshold of historical erasure, Doğa Yirik activates a form of counter memory, probing the political and affective agency inherent in the act of memorialization itself.

Side events of the exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Memory Museum for Historical Justice, will be announced shortly.