Unutma Bahçesi / The Garden of (not) Forgetting

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Long-term artistic research in collaboration with Eda Aslan, formed into installations, exhibitions, video and texts between 2017 and 2022 in İstanbul, Hamburg, and Fürth

exhibited at
Futureless Memory, Kunsthaus Hamburg

The Garden of (not) Forgetting is a carrier bag story. It is a collection of “open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life”. In the particular universe of Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden, Dilﬂad and Eda have discovered and gathered together multiple geographies, histories, stories, species and hopes.

I have had the privilege to follow this assemblage take shape since its beginning when we walked together in The Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden in 2017. The space was officially transferred to the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs but still in its original function and accessible. The glasshouse of the garden was a magical receptacle of plants gathered from all different parts of the world: an interior which contained the exteriors of many climates and geographies. The Garden of (not) Forgetting poetically blends stories of diaspora, transplantation, adaptation and taking root told in plants with those of its founders, their families sent to exile by the Nazi regime or the Republic of Turkey, back and forth, spun in politics, history and life.

Scenes from A Place: Garden multi-channel video installation
The earth of the Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden has been inscribed by identity politics, rifts, exiles and coercion as well as life, care and continuity. The Garden of (not) Forgetting is a transcription, or better yet, a propagation of the damaged space and everything connected to it into a version of alternative politics: alternatives which act by recreating an accessible version of the inaccessible herbarium, and naming another one after the female scientist whose name was previously not uttered and telling the stories of the oscillating lives of the scientists burdened by politics of their own species but adopted and rescued by a planetary garden. This is a work of salvage and that of resistance, one which not only collects but recreates from pieces, remembers and propagates its subject and its entanglements in soils reimagined.

Excerpt from Of Carrier Bags, Gardens and Boxes, exhibition text written by Aslıhan Demirtaş, 2021

Memory of A Place, Topography of Destruction

Archival and spatial research in collaboration with Eda Aslan,
with a focus on the plot where the Botanical Garden was rooted.

Presented at

SALT Research and Programs

Kunsthaus Hamburg

When passing the Golden Horn Bridge, one’s curiosity is piqued by a single remaining green space. A piece of land in the Historical Peninsula... Upon that spot today lies the Botanic Institute and the Alfred Heilbronn Botanic Garden, connected to Istanbul University. From the Ottoman State to our present-day, in certain periods, such institutions as the Janissary Corps, the office of the Shaykh al-Islam (Shaykh al Islam), the Istanbul Girls High School, and the office of the Istanbul Muftiate (Istanbul Müftülüğü) have all taken charge of this space. Over the years and within the frame of this changing land, fires, demolitions, and executions have all taken place. The soil covers over these layers of history, upon which today live plants from various climes. For eighty years, the garden has provided habitat for 3,000 plant species.

The ruling to hand over the garden estate to the Presidency of Religious Affairs and to demolish the Institute of Botanics, which was officially announced in 2017, called attention to the building’s relationship with the city, social memory, and urban and cultural heritage. On this tract of land on the Historic Peninsula, in the corner of Süleymaniye Mosque, the Istanbul Muftiate aims to reconstruct Bab-ı Meşihat Building. The precondition of this is the demolition of the Botanical Institute—a structure built in 1935 and certified as a site of cultural heritage. When looking into the past of this site, we see that this situation of demolition and reconstruction continually repeats itself physically and symbolically.

Every changing political period brings with it forms of social rupture and influences that physically alter the spaces of the city. Every demolition opens the door to the erasure and destruction of one aspect of urban memory. This becomes a form of trauma spreading through the city. From the stories told in this narrative, it is possible to speak of a commonality shared among structures rooted in the land, plants, stones, and people. This commonality is the state of displacement/heimatlos that changes with each period and changing ideologies. Just like the exile of the professors that are at the centre of this story, maybe this piece of land itself can be read as one of many exiles.

Memory of a Place and the Topography of Destruction research questions the connections of the present decision with past conflicts and exiles.