Across the Layers of a Transforming City: “Aynı Şehirde” at Offgrid Art Project
Founded in Taksim in 2024 by İpek Eyüboğlu, the independent platform Offgrid Art Project opens the new season driven by a commitment to dismantle art’s privileged enclosure and embed it directly at the heart of urban life. Marking the platform’s season opener, the group exhibition “Aynı Şehirde” (“In the Same City”), running from September 18 to October 25, 2026, probes Istanbul’s multi-temporal memory through the lenses of three photographers. Also featured within the parallel program of 212 Photography Istanbul, the selection centers on the core premise that “The city changes; but it never truly begins anew.”
The exhibition brings together three singular perspectives that intersect across a shared geography. While Ci Demi captures overlooked, fleeting moments and the innate rhythm embedded within the flow of everyday life, Tibet Oktay Aslan documents the weight of time absorbed into plaster and concrete, reading history directly off the city’s physical body. Hüseyin Güler, meanwhile, engages with strata of social memory and identity to unearth Istanbul’s invisible narratives. This polyphonic, multi-layered visual reading offers a way to comprehend the metropolis not through grand cataclysms or radical ruptures, but through the lingering residue left behind by transformation.
