Displacement is far more than a single line drawn across a map or a set of statistical data. Migration is a layered experience that quietly yet radically transforms one’s relationship with home, body, language, and belonging. DEPO in Tophane hosts this polyphonic memory through the exhibition titled “Stories of Migration: Art, Resistance and Solidarity Across Borders,” running through September 27, 2026. Bringing together works by Adele Tamam, Ara Chalym, Irmak Suzan Ertaş, Persefoni Myrtsou, and Saeed Mirshekari, the selection eschews presenting migration as a homogenized, singular experience, focusing instead on the distinct forms it assumes within each artist’s practice.
Traces Infiltrating Home to Body, Language to Geography
Through painting, video, photography, text, and spatial installations, the exhibition renders visible the multifaceted dimensions of migration:
Adele Tamam: Drawing from the playhouses she built out of cardboard boxes during her childhood in Yemen, her installation The Game of Home Home interrogates the notion of “home” and its ties not only to a sense of security, but also to loss, confinement, and borders. Meanwhile, her work A Child’s Premonition bridges childhood drawings with contemporary geographical reality.
Saeed Mirshekari: Drawing upon medical and optical terminology (Thanatosis, Cyanosis), his works examine the body’s physical responses to uncertainty, oppression, and trauma. The cumbersome bureaucratic language the artist encountered throughout his asylum process directly translates into artistic material within his works.
Persefoni Myrtsou: In her video and installation titled The Holy Water of Armaş, she weaves together the local history of Armaş in Kocaeli with her family’s own narrative of forced displacement from Eastern Thrace to Greece through the memory of soil, agriculture, and seeds.
Irmak Suzan Ertaş: In her work Here-Say, she examines the transformation a narrative undergoes as it passes from language to language via field notes, audio recordings, and real-time translations. The Threads of Akmeşe, constructed with an overhead projector and acetate sheets, offers a layered narrative continuously reshaped through audience participation.
Ara Chalym: Through the series Mountain Speaks to Mountain and works on paper, Chalym reproduces the personal and collective memory carried across geographies between textual and visual layers.
A Collaborative Network Spanning Pristina to Istanbul
Laid in Pristina in September 2025, the foundation of the project matured through an artist-in-residence program hosted by the Armaş Foundation in March 2026, alongside gatherings at BAK Basecamp in Utrecht. Shaped by the ethos of cohabitation, research, and witnessing each other’s process—free from the pressure of producing a predetermined outcome—this process culminated in the exhibition at DEPO, led by mezopArt in partnership with BAK Basecamp, New Women Connectors, and Hür Adalar. Stories of Migration stands as a tangible testament to artistic solidarity and the pursuit of a shared memory forged across borders.
