Looking at Osmanbey: Social and Spatial Entanglements of Fashion Trade

Lecture Performance by Ali Taptik

How can spatial transformation and production of urban area be positioned within history? Where is the line between the personal and the social histories? These are some of the questions Taptik addresses as part of his doctoral research titled “Artistic Practice as Architectural Research.” Through a constant detailing of a timeline and a personal map, the researcher tries to understand the actors and the events that led to the transformation of an upper-middle class residential neighborhood into a textile wholesale district. Şair Nigar’s escape from the police, revolutionaries’ safe-houses, a stayover with his grandmother become part of larger narrative layered into this subjective timeline aiming to reveal a void for the textile wholesale to take over. The lecture performance relates synthetic materials, ubiquitous elements of contemporary textile and building technologies with the interaction between global economy and the transformation of this urban area.



  Ali Taptık (1983) is an artist and PhD Candidate in Architectural Design at ITU. Representation of urban landscape and architecture, the relationship between the individual and the city, psychogeography and interaction of literature and visuality are some of the themes that he explores. Taptık has published several books including Kaza ve Kader (2009), Depicting Istanbul (2010), There are no failed experiments. (2012) and Nothing Surprising (2015). His works have been exhibited in various institutions including SALT (Istanbul), MAXXI (Rome), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut) and Venice Biennial for Architecture. Taptık is one of the founders of Bandrolsüz collective for the distribution of independent artists’ books and a member of the Initiative for the Preservation of Historical Vegetable Gardens of Yedikule.


Ali Taptik participated 2013 in the summer school on urban studies "History Takes Place" of ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius.