In the same city you were not able to turn gray 11

In the same city you were not able to turn gray? Inhabiting place is

in the past, in memories? Derek?y in G?k?da has a peculiarity of

being the biggest village of Turkey according to 1950 population

numbers. An important part of the village has been subject to a

mandatory migration to Greece as a result of the exchange agreement

in 1923. Most of the people left behind, however, have had to leave

their village during the Cyprus events. Today in the village, apart

from a couple of Greek families, there are only a few families coming

from the south-east and east Anatolia, which left their lands because

of the terrorist activities in the region. It seems that their

destiny intersects with that of the island inhabitants at this point.

Silence nowadays is dominant in the village which has been very

lively once-upon-a-time. Have you ever been in a place where you

cannot hear any voice of children? The second part of this work can

be done for the Turkish villages in Greece, which have been vacated

as a result of the exchange between Turkey and Greece. It is a known

reality that the same hassle has also been faced there. While I was

preparing my exhibition, I always thought unbearable sadness that I

faced when I had to leave a place where I had settled down for a

while. My main concern was to be able to pass on my bare emotions to

you, the spectators. For all time, I imagined how the feelings might

be when we had to walk away from the places where we lived our

childhood leaving behind all of our memories overnight which had been

actually built up in years. While walking around the dead houses, the

old inhabitants of them might even have grieved with me again. I

touched the remembrances of the dead houses? residents. Their hands

might also touch to their memories together with me. I was crushed

under the heaviness of the memories. Here is G?k?da, Derek?y. This is

where a population exchange took place. I would like the observers to

watch this exhibition from this point of view. I wish this exhibition

to be remembered not as a population exchange documentary, but a

conceptual work. At the end of the day, the actual truth is the pure

emotions lived there, isn?t it? The short lines under the photograph

squares are from the poems of Ritsos, and Kavafis who also comes from

a family, which has lived the same exchange adversity while ago. I

came across them at the end of my work, and I have realised that

those lines were amazingly overlapping the things that I have seen

while taking photographs. That is actually why I have chosen the

title of my exhibition from a poem of Kavafis, named as ?The City?: ?

New places you shall never find, you'll not find other seas. The city

still shall follow you. You'll wander still in the same streets,

you'll roam in the same neighbourhoods, in these same houses you'll

turn gray.?