Abandoned Bended City - Fahrettin Örenli

Name: Abandoned Bended City - Fahrettin Örenli
Start: 2025-09-30T18:00:00+03:00
End: 2025-09-30T21:00:00+03:00
Location: ARK Kültür Batarya Sok. No:2 Beyoğlu İstanbul

Schedule

Tue Sep 30 2025 at 06:00 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC+03:00

Location

ARK Kültür Batarya Sok. No:2 Beyoğlu İstanbul | Istanbul, IB

Artists: Fahrettin Örenli
Curator: Marianne Wagner
Cuban Interventions Curator: Sachie Hernández and Viviana Vázquez
Venue: ARK Kültür, Istanbul Opening: 20 September 2025, 6 pm Exhibition dates: 23 September – 14 November 2025 Official Collateral Event of the 18th Istanbul Biennial (The Three-Legged Cat)
Entering the Abandoned Bended City
With Abandoned Bended City, Amsterdam- and Istanbul-based artist Fahrettin Örenli transforms ARK Kültür into a living exhibition that unfolds across three floors and the garden of the historic villa. Anchored by the immersive video work The Tale of the Abandoned Bended City, the project intertwines autobiographical memory with the geopolitical realities of cities such as Istanbul, Havana, and Amsterdam—names that for many already carry an aura of distance and imagination. In Örenli’s hands, these places become poetic coordinates for transformation, collapse, and resilience.
His practice—spanning drawing, poetry, photography, video, light, and sound installations—has long examined the social, political, and economic structures that shape our lives. Yet Örenli does not simply document what he encounters. He allows experiences from distant and often inaccessible places to flow through him, transforming them into poetic forms. His works remind us that art is always the subjective gaze of a single person—yet it is precisely through this subjectivity that a wider truth becomes visible.
Visitors arrive through the garden and descend into the dark, slightly musty cellar, where the exhibition begins. This underground space currently houses two video works, The Zombie Ants and The Genes of the City, interwoven with poetry, drawings, and paintings. From this atmosphere of density and shadow, the path leads upwards through a narrow staircase lined with fragments of poetry, into the ground floor where a monumental wall drawing spreads like an educational canvas. This work unfolds Örenli’s cosmos of thought, tracing how knowledge arises and takes shape in human consciousness.
The journey continues through stairwells hung with drawings into the upper floor, a strikingly bright and airy space filled with large-scale works that appear almost lifted into the air, carrying an ethereal quality. Here the exhibition opens toward clarity, reflecting on human understanding, lived experience, and the fragile conclusions we draw about our place in the world.
In this way, Abandoned Bended City turns the entire villa into one continuous narrative landscape: a house transformed into a living organism of Örenli’s artistic logic, where darkness and light, density and openness, knowledge and poetry are experienced as interconnected states.
The Salon of Many Voices
Every other evening, Abandoned Bended City transforms into a salon: visitors are invited to step inside, share the atmosphere, and encounter whatever unfolds. Nothing is predetermined—each night gives rise to new constellations of voices, gestures, and exchanges.
As part of this evolving structure, Örenli has invited, in collaboration with the curators Sachie Hernández and Viviana Vázquez, a group of Cuban artists—Mari Claudia García, Clara Massó, Jenny Feal, Lisandra Ramírez, Frank Mujica, Antonio E. Tonel, Antonio Margolles, Levi Orta, Carlos Zorrilla, and José Angel Vincench—whose poetic interventions will expand the exhibition. Whether they manage to be present in Istanbul or contribute works from afar remains open, reflecting the realities of transnational exchange. Hernández and Vázquez are committed to making these collaborations possible, while also fostering the participation of younger voices. The result is an exhibition that is never static: it shifts, adapts, and grows, remaining open to surprise and transformation.