Last night in a fit of unusual sociability, the GF and I went with an artist friend to the opening of a show at a gallery in Cihangir. It was a tiny space, the basement of a building so very arty. The first person met was a European photographer who had just come from giving a keynote speech, he said several times, and the short conversation made me feel a little dead inside, as social encounters often do. After this unpromising start things improved a little, as we squeezed into the gallery space where I quite liked the paintings. The artist, a young French fellow, was there and very keen to talk about his work which he said he made always on the ground. I felt a question welling up inside me and couldn’t help but ask, which was – if the paintings were made on the ground, did it matter which way they were hung up on a wall? To do him credit, he answered seriously that it did matter, but he could only tell after they were complete.
We met another woman, a gallery director near us, and have planned to go see her show today.
Then we fled, overwhelmed by sociability and the weather, as the cold front across Europe brushed against Istanbul last night, and today it is still cold and raining.
Along the we passed an apartment building called, Unutma Beni Apartmanı, the do-not-forget-me or the remember-me building, straight out of the novel.