Selected Projects — VI

Echoes of Silence

Libraries and opera houses photographed by Ahmet Ertuğ

Venue: Arkas Art Center, Izmir
Dates: 15 September – 30 December 2012
Curator: Károly Aliotti
Artist: Ahmet Ertuğ
Works: 44 large-format photographs

Ahmet Ertuğ has photographed the historical libraries and opera houses of Europe in monumental large-format prints. The photographs hold these interiors in stillness — the silence of the reading rooms, the suspended acoustics of the auditorium — architecture built around sound and its absence.

Many are made from the two positions the buildings themselves propose: from the centre of the stage, where the performer faces the hall, and from the boxes opposite, where the hall faces the performer. The exchange of gazes the architecture was designed for is restaged photographically.

The exhibition brought together forty-four photographs — twenty-one opera houses and concert halls, twenty-three historical libraries — among them La Fenice in Venice, the Palais Garnier in Paris, the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Palácio Nacional de Mafra near Lisbon, and the library of Trinity College Dublin.

The Publication

Echoes of Silence

Editor: Károly Aliotti
Texts: Rolf Sachsse
Translation: Serra Karapınar Yentürk
Design: Lisa Dixon
Publisher: Arkas Art Center, first edition, September 2012
Details: 24 pages, 40 × 30 cm, English, Turkish & French · ISBN 9786055974244