Michael Rakowitz: The Whistling Memory | Yapı Kredi Museum

The exhibition “The Whistling Memory”, which will remain on view at Yapı Kredi Museum from 22 January through 7 June 2026, brings together works by Akram Zaatari, Hilal Can, and Michael Rakowitz, along with items from the museum’s permanent collection.

Conceived on the basis of the Museum’s Numismatics and Shadow Theatre collections, the exhibition puts forward a narrative that reaches from the history of theatre and performance, and Ottoman-era archaeological excavations until Mesopotamia. “The Whistling Memory” approaches the past not as a fixed, sealed structure, but rather as a living narrational space that may forever be reshaped with each of its summonings. Aiming to free memory from being doomed to remain a voiceless record, it invites us to envision historiography as a re-enactment practice –rather than a linear transmission– instituted by way of the body, and therefore breath, as well as the voice.

Akram Zaatari, Hilal Can, and Michael Rakowitz all question the relationship between historiography and storytelling. The works by Michael Rakowitz displayed in the exhibition grant visibility to the destruction brought about by the Iraq War, and on the consequences of the obliteration cultural heritage that this destruction led to in Mesopotamia. Akram Zaatari contributes to the exhibition with works which reexamine the archive regarding the excavations conducted by Osman Hamdi Bey in Saida with the help of photographs and newly made translations. As for Hilal Can, she revives, via mythologies and the politics of the body, the storytelling language particular to Karagöz and Hacivat, made up of light and shadow. The exhibition is curated by Burcu Çimen the director of Yapi Kredi Museum. 

“The Whistling Memory” focuses on the way(s) in –and the languages through– which history has been told so far.

The exhibition catalogue, which will published in March, will feature texts regarding the artists involved in the exhibition penned by Seçil Epik, Edhem Eldem, and Vid Simoniti. The book will bring the recollections which make up the report on the Saida excavations, authored by Osman Hamdi Bey and Théodore Reinach in 1892, to the attention of readers in its first translation into Turkish to this day. Both the exhibition and its accompanying publication are edited by Sanat Dünyamız editor Fisun Yalçınkaya.