Full HD Video Installation – Color – Sound – 19’44”- 2014

Did Mickiewicz transform his stay in the Ottoman Empire into a spectacle charting the death of a romantic poet? Even if it wasn’t so in his day, today every gesture and private narrative become a spectacle. Extracts of Guy Debord’s play The Society of the Spectacle, a critique of contemporary art as a tool of control and gentrification featured in Özgür Demirci’s video, may thus become a useful tool to research the past and the current condition of the quarter in which the Polish poet died. The video takes Tarlabaşı inside the Mickiewicz Museum, where it gains its intellectual and symbolic foothold and marks an attempt at charting the “psychogeography” of the neighbourhood.

*Project supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute