Horizon Line

Klitsa Antoniou’s installation Parallelotopias works in tandem with Orhan Pamuk’s biography Istanbul, Memories of a City (2005) in order to visually and somatically erase Pamuk’s memories of the city. However, this artistic intervention is not directed towards Pamuk’s representation of the layers of memory of the history of Constantinople that he unfolds through the pages of the book but rather it is a gesture that attempts to establish a new relationship between the text and the viewer. In short this is an act of deconstruction that furthers what Pamuk has already initiated in his book with the insertion of two hundred or so photographs in the text. ….

Through the doors [the entrance room] the visitor can glance the parallel spaces of the exhibition, the Horizon Line, through a series of seventy models with the eyes resting beyond on the horizon on the sea that ferried the many waves of immigration to the city. The models, created by seventy artists, provide a dialogue with the photographs of Pamuk’s book uncovering through intricate constructions/deconstructions the memories of the artist through spaces, sometimes familiar – a staircase, a dining room, a court yard – and objects associated with these spaces, in order to reveal their materiality as mnemonic devices and provide parallel voices to those of the photographs. The installation cuts through three rooms of the building thus creating a further dialogue between Constantinople and Thessaloniki. (Parallelotopias, Gabriel Koureas, Birkbeck College, University of London)