But It has been Byzantium, Constantinopolis, in the mid-Byzantine period it was simply Polis, in the Ottoman period it was Kostantiniyye, İslambol and Dersaadet, and many other things; but it was never only Istanbul. It became Istanbul. It generalized the name Istanbul forgetting its countless old names and adopting the least political, least religious and least ethnical among the ones in use. It became a category where countless existences and meanings could be produced and placed under a single name, yet could never be filled.
The exhibition Becoming Istanbul has the purpose of visualizing these countless existences and meanings from as many angles as possible, featuring an interactive audiovisual database on contemporary Istanbul and a 16-minute complementary film titled Mapping Istanbul.
Media accessed through projections includes works by artists, architectural projects, videos, photographs, cartoons and essays produced in the last 10 years and expressing the conditions and actors forming today’s Istanbul.
The book produced along with the exhibition is a multi-authored bedside book which discusses the current changes that the city undergoes within 152 different items.
Like Istanbul, Bahrain is undergoing vast changes in its urban and social structure. The aim of taking the example of expanding metropolis, is an eye opener on the future of the underlying traditions and habits on the verge of extinction.
The exhibition, originally realized for the German Architecture Museum