The museum is a bank — SALT Beyoğlu, İstanbul, 2025.
Written in lipstick on a restroom mirror, this unsanctioned intervention folds the building’s history as the Ottoman Bank into its present cultural role, asking what forms of capital the institution still accumulates — and for whom.
The museum is gentrification — Arter, İstanbul, 2025.
Lipstick on a restroom mirror. This intervention names the institution not as neutral, but as an active engine of displacement and capital in Dolapdere.
The museum is not İstanbul—İstanbul Modern, 2025
Written in lipstick on a restroom mirror. The intervention confronts the institution’s glossy branding and denies its claim to represent the lived city. The name “Istanbul” becomes a façade — the museum is not the city, but its estrangement.
The museum is orientalism — Pera Museum, Istanbul, 2025.
Written in lipstick on a restroom mirror. The inscription names the institution through its own collection, where the European gaze on the East becomes the gaze of the museum itself.
The museum is a brand — Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul, 2025.
Written in lipstick on a restroom mirror. This intervention names the institution not as a cultural commons but as corporate branding, where a family name functions as a logo and inheritance becomes marketing.
The museum is the nation — İstanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture
Written in lipstick on a restroom mirror. This intervention names the museum as an extension of the nation itself, a site where art history is framed to embody state ideology and culture becomes national identity.
The museum is displacement — Galata Greek School, Istanbul.
Written in lipstick on a restroom mirror. The building was seized, returned, and repurposed. Heritage becomes policy; restitution becomes display.
The museum is a battleship — İstanbul Naval Museum, Istanbul.
Written in lipstick on a restroom mirror. Like a battleship, the museum is an engine of display: heavy, armored, and monumental. Its vessels, trophies, and artifacts parade power as spectacle, turning histories of conquest into cultural heritage.
The museum is the Saturday Mothers — Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat, İstanbul.
Written in lipstick on a restroom mirror. Since 1995, the Saturday Mothers have gathered at Galatasaray Square to demand justice for their disappeared relatives — victims of enforced disappearances under state custody. Holding red carnations and the photographs of the missing, their weekly vigils persist as one of the longest-running acts of civil disobedience in Türkiye.
Only a few meters from the square where their sit-ins are forbidden, the museum displays heritage; the Mothers display the search for justice and the courage to persist.