x-ist hosts “A Ghost Story” between April 24 and May 23, an exhibition that brings together the works of Burak Dak, Gülin Hayat Topdemir and Sefa Karakuş, curated by Beren Boran and titled after David Lowery’s film of the same name.
The teaching of time proceeds along that straight line where the hour and minute hands gently follow one another. Life is perceived as if it were merely the sum of successive moments. Yet time is not so compliant. Rather than a measured and ordered classification, it consists of traces left by layers that continuously accumulate, are erased and overlap anew. Each trace, instead of concealing the previous one, coexists with it. Thus, time transforms into a living memory that multiplies within itself.
In “A Ghost Story,” the artists disrupt the structure of this conventional teaching and construct their own clocks; by taking the course of time from Chronos and giving it to Aion, they render visible on the surface that life is not contained within a single line but resides in the simultaneous existence of different layers. As the ghosts of the past haunt the present, they also carry within them the buds of the future; memories expand like a living organism, holding both today and tomorrow within. As seeds sprouting from subterranean passages turn their faces toward the future, the sharp boundaries of chronology blur; time loses its linear flow and is reconstructed as intermingling layers.
Shaped around the concept of the palimpsest, this exhibition opens up a space where traces, images and memory—erased yet not entirely lost—can coexist on the same surface. The surface carries not only what is visible but also the time accumulated beneath it; each layer, while recalling the past, also invites the future inward. Thus, rather than fixing time, the exhibition offers an experiential field that multiplies, deepens and rethinks it.
“A Ghost Story” can be visited at x-ist’s space in Gümüşsuyu between April 24 and May 23.