The Invisible City Behind Closed Doors: ‘No Unauthorized Personnel’ at Salt Galata
We all recognize the ubiquitous yellow-and-black signage affixed to the rusted iron gates of construction sites, workshops, and manufacturing plants: No Unauthorized Personnel. A warning most passersby brush past without a second thought, it demarcates far more than a physical threshold; it encapsulates how physical labour, mechanical clamour, and the circulation of capital are meticulously shielded from public view. Stepping through the layered architectural memory of Karaköy into Salt Galata, the institution’s latest exhibition sets out precisely to breach these closed portals. Programmed by Eylül Şenses and on view through 14 February 2027, the presentation reframes the factory not as a nostalgic relic of industrial heritage, but as an active terrain of struggle inscribed across bodies, urban topographies, and global supply chains.
Since the 1980s, we have witnessed inner-city factory chimneys systematically give way to luxury residences, shopping malls, and cultural hubs. Production was banished to the periphery—shunted into Organized Industrial Zones and anonymous logistics sheds along motorway corridors to keep it conveniently out of sight. Yet from the very outset, the exhibition’s central thesis makes itself felt: manufacturing has not vanished from space; rather, it has dispersed into the fabric of everyday life itself, mediated through smartphone screens and reaching into the city’s furthest margins.
Spanning the ground and first floors, the exhibition maintains an unrelenting momentum, disorienting the viewer across shifting scales at every turn. Merve Bedir’s work confronts us with the chilling calculus of human optimization, where algorithms and automation discipline the worker’s body with millimetric precision. Immediately following is the research-led intervention by Kamil Dalkır and Sibel Karadağ, which marks one of the show’s most cinematic and searing passages. The duo escorts us into Istanbul’s landfill sites, where European refuse is absorbed under the sanitized banner of “recycling.” Filtering through the screen, the labored breaths of migrant laborers toiling in the toxic haze state unequivocally who bears the true cost of the global waste economy.
Moving deeper into the galleries, the dusty strata of collective memory begin to open up. belit sağ transports viewers back to the Sümerbank Bakırköy Textile Factory, an indelible fixture of Turkey’s mid-century landscape. The fate of state-owned enterprises—liquidated under neoliberal dogma as supposed “burdens on the public purse”—is brought face to face with the visceral reality of corroded lungs and bodies maimed at the loom. Dilşad Aladağ’s spatial inquiry traces the evolution of the Simyonoğlu Factory into the National Factory (Millî Fabrika) and, ultimately, into a museum, excavating the fissure between state-orchestrated amnesia and personal testimony. Meanwhile, Metehan Özcan’s found archive, distilled from yellowed job postings and factory yearbooks, interrogates the gendered and productive divides lurking beneath modernism’s utopian promise of “sunlit housing and planned industrial estates.”
Yet the exhibition resists casting workers merely as passive casualties, adroitly bringing the origins of agency and resistance into frame. Archival footage compiled by Sultan Gökdemir from the 1989 Spring Actions (Bahar Eylemleri) vividly recalls how thousands of workers spilled out of factories to transform urban streets into arenas of collective dissent. Elsewhere, a collaborative work by Tamar Levit and Yaën S. Levi, recorded alongside Neval Tarım and the Working Hands (Çalışan Eller) choir, reverberates the voices of invisible women from garment sweatshops through the gallery void. The unseen fingers concealed behind multinational fashion labels forge a network of solidarity through song, swelling into a collective respiration that fills the room.
The investigation does not conclude on the main floors. Installed on the third level and curated by Orkun Dayıoğlu from Salt Research, the archival presentation Out of the Archive: Industrial Architecture in Turkey (Arşivden çıktı: Türkiye’de Sanayi Mimarlığı) functions as a crucial postscript to the overarching narrative. Spanning factory designs from the 1930s through the 1970s by seminal architects such as Doğan Tekeli, Sami Sisa, Aydın Boysan, Şevki Pekin, and Cengiz Bektaş, the display documents how architecture in Turkey was never a purely aesthetic exercise, but a structural staging of labor bridging the early Republic with its nationwide industrialization drive.
No Unauthorized Personnel stands as one of the season’s most incisive offerings for anyone seeking to interrogate the vast machinery, sweat, and suppressed histories obscured behind the city’s polished facades. Rather than taking refuge in Galata’s picturesque historicism, the exhibition summons the raw immediacy of the street and production within institutional walls—earning a mandatory place at the top of any cultural calendar through 14 February 2027.
