By Rene Events

STRAIT is an exhibition that manifests the constrained and narrow Bosphorus Strait as a human-scaled passageway. By framing the geographic scale as an experiential condition, the exhibition opens up a range of aesthetic and political concerns for architectural imagination and the broader public.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the Caspian oil reserves in the 1990s, the Bosphorus Strait became one of the busiest international oil tanker routes of the world. Compared to the other routes however, the Strait stands unique by passing through the heart of Istanbul, a city of fourteen million citizens. The environmental concerns regarding the transit of colossal oil tankers through this narrow and difficult navigational route have been conflicted with the controversies around transnational energy pipelines and various other large-scale infrastructural and urban transformation projects.

STRAIT brings this framework to architectural and public imaginaries by manifesting the Bosphorus Strait through the tangible experience of an installation object. It introduces the idea of the geographic object, in this instance, an extrusion of the Strait shorelines without articulating its actual topography. In addition to the installation, the exhibition consists of a geographic fiction illustrated through a series of drawings presented in the form a silent film. While this geographic fiction tells of a colossal oil tanker becoming stuck in the Bosphorus Strait, the STRAIT object itself becomes one of the characters in the fiction.

Design and research: Neyran Turan

Title: STRAIT
Website: http://saltonline.org/en#!/en/1137/strait
Organizers: SALT Istanbul
From: Wed, 27 May 2015 12:34
Until: Sun, 02 Aug 2015 12:35
Venue: SALT Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkey
Address: SALT Beyoglu, Istiklal Caddesi, No:136, Beyoglu, 34430, Istanbul, Turkey

Source:: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ArchDaily/~3/d-uQHZ8rlmU/