Public spaces and streets have not traditionally been places for artistic expression in Turkey. The thousands of sculptures adorning the city centres have mostly been reserved for figures of historical or ideological importance. That’s why it was a first when the international project My City, run by the British Council Turkey, invited artists from Europe to stay in five Turkish cities and create public artworks.

“My City is an arts project, led by artists,” says David Codling, the British Council Turkey’s Director of Arts and the Director of ‘My City’, “It is also a political project.” Funded by the European Union’s Cultural Bridges programme and run by the British Council, the project has been implemented with a network of partners led by Anadolu Kültür and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre.

Codling explained that: “the outdoor art works commissioned for “My City” in Çanakkale, Istanbul, Konya, Mardin and Trabzon not only demonstrate the many contrasts between those cities but provided valuable insights into the different elements which make up the identity of each one.” The artist assigned to each city was free to interpret any artwork that they felt was right for their respective city.

Useful sculptures and time machines

In the northern city of Trabzon, the Finnish artist Minna Henriksson worked with young people to prepare an alternative city guide that helps challenge stereotypes. Henriksson also placed a gigantic light installation, which featured the lyrics to a song by a famous local band, on the outskirts of the city overlooking a neighbourhood awaiting redevelopment. “As well as being monumental, the installation is fragile and vulnerable and the local people have embraced it and made it their own,” says Codling.

German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer chose to build what he calls a “useful sculpture” by creating an artwork that also serves as an outdoor screen in city of Mardin. For Codling, the sculpture “compels the onlooker, whether up-close or far away, to consider how this very ancient city’s location at the point where Anatolia and Mesopotamia meet has shaped its complex and ambiguous identity.”

For Istanbul, Austrian artist Andreas Fogarasi chose to “reinterpret a nineteenth-century convention with a starkly elegant and rational panorama structure,” and created a work “exploring some of the contradictions of Istanbul, the great metropolis and imperial capital whose coherence as a city is threatened by the confused and jarring results of its exponential growth.”

Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska's work was a criticism of the Language Revolution of the early years of the Turkish Republic when the Ottoman Turkish language was deemed dead. Rajkowska built a shallow pool in the main square of Konya, home to the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi. Beneath the pool she placed an Ottoman Turkish translation of Walter Benjamin’s 1923 “The Task of the Translator.” The text of the German original then appears, followed by the Turkish translation.

British artist Mark Wallinger’s time machine in Çanakkale was inspired by the city’s location at the narrowest point of the Dardanelles, associated with the legend of Troy and the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915. Wallinger’s work allowed the viewer to see Dardanelles exactly how it looked twenty-four hours before, serving both as a post-modern time machine, and “a deeply serious memorial.”

Codling says that the cities were chosen as “places which have strong resonances for the local people as well as for outsiders,” and that, “any intervention by an artist from another culture in a particular city space is delicate as well as revealing.”

In an editorial penned for the project book, both editors of the project, Özge Açıkkol and Seçil Yersel, wrote: “The My City project continues. These works call for a distinct design for sustainability. Hence, the artists’ research activities in these cities and the kinds of relationships they established with their cities constitute the most important aspect of their projects.” For Açıkkol and Yersel, the project was “a multi-dimensional experience,” “hoping to nourish a critical reflexivity” for a “different and honest practice of art criticism.”