{İniş Çıkış Yukarı Aşağı} (translated as Ups and Downs) is a multi-site banner installation situated across six streetlamps in a neighborhood of Istanbul. The work operates in the interstices of palmistry, topography, and literary hallucination, drawing its conceptual framework from Maurice Blanchot’s enigmatic novella Death Sentence.
At its core, the piece is composed of six textual banners, each bearing a description of a palm. Not the mythic palm of fate-tellers, but real, singular palms: five sent in by close friends and one belonging to the artist. These palm prints, though unseen, are rendered through an analytical, almost cartographic prose that traces the unpredictable trajectories of lines broken, vanishing, intersecting, and diverging on the skin. One such text reads:
"There are a couple of broken and short lanes. Somewhere in the middle, three strike one another, scatter, and some vanish. Again, from the confused, broken central line, two smaller lines leave, one to the hard left and one to the right. The line going left is so distinguished that it splits the surface into two uneven parts..."
These descriptions evoke spatial formations without images, relying entirely on language to construct imaginary geometries. Each palm becomes its own territory mapped not by destiny, but by the fragmented logic of poetic observation. The method is precise, almost obsessive, as if authored by a geometer hallucinating his own instruments.
Installed in public space, the work displaces the intimate (the palm, the friend, the line) into the civic. The banner format suggests announcement, warning, or celebration, yet what is declared is instead ambiguity. No names, no context, only the pure abstraction of lived skin turned into speculative form.
The title, İniş Çıkış Yukarı Aşağı, refers both to the literal lines of the palm and to the psychic terrain of life’s unpredictability: descent, ascent, above, below. Through its interplay of private gesture and public text, bodily map and urban marker, the work invites passersby to decipher something that hovers between the personal and the illegible, the biographical and the constructed.
Ultimately, {İniş Çıkış Yukarı Aşağı} asks: What do the surfaces of our bodies record? And what might they reveal when treated not as signs to be interpreted but as territories to be written, erased, and projected onto the shared space of the city?
Exhibition view from the {iniş çıkış yukarı aşağı} 2016, Moda | Istanbul
Digital printing on banner, 250 x 80 cm
Exhibition view from the {iniş çıkış yukarı aşağı} 2016, Moda | Istanbul
Digital printing on banner, 250 x 80 cm
Exhibition view from the {iniş çıkış yukarı aşağı} 2016, Moda | Istanbul
Digital printing on banner, 250 x 80 cm
Exhibition view from the {iniş çıkış yukarı aşağı} 2016, Moda | Istanbul
Digital printing on banner, 250 x 80 cm
Exhibition view from the {iniş çıkış yukarı aşağı} 2016, Moda | Istanbul
Irem Gunaydin