Reminiscence

French art historian and writer André Malraux presented the notion of the “imaginary museum” in 1947, proposing that artworks that are imprisoned in museums can be reproduced through photography allowing, people to form their own personal museums. Artworks, which were produced at different times and by different techniques, were produced over and over again photographically to then be transformed into familiar images.

The aforementioned concept, which charges the museums with multiple temporalities, is traced to cemeteries in Memento. Ayrılık Çeşmesi Cemetery, which was going to be turned into an open-air museum in the 1970s, but then was dislocated and damaged in the process; in 2013 the Marmaray line construction partially destroyed this cemetery. Through it, notions of send-offs, departures, remembrance, tribute, glorification, monumentalization, and forgetting are meant to be reconsidered.