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Two common questions could come up when curating the Turkish pavilion in the Venice Biennale, one being how to create manoeuvres in order to escape from ‘national pavilion representation’ and the other, how to create a specific visual engagement about social, economical and political issues within the ‘glamorous’ city marketing of the biennal. Both artists and curators who often work conceptually on global socio-political concepts or with informal structures must be aware of such problems. In the last Turkish pavilion, artist Hüseyin Alptekin and curator Vasıf Kortun managed to escape the national perspective and focused on the geopolitical condition, which was represented by local narratives. Their exhibition in the Arsenale challenged, in my opinion, the expected presentation or ‘cliché’ of Turkish contemporary art. The upcoming exhibition curated by Basak Senova seems to expand and re-create the opportunity that was set in the last biennial. The two invited artists, Banu Cennetoglu and Ahmet Ögüt, both often investigate the ambiguous site of ‘image’, specifically when unavailable in certain geopolitical conditions. Senova’s project, aptly entitled Lapses, refers to the disorientation that can occur when an image is subjectively reconstructed via personal and collective memory. Although Cennetoglu and Ögüt work with diverse mediums and focus on different issues, they share a common concern regarding the affects of socio-political realities and endurance in politically ambiguous places. Ahmet Ögüt participates with his work Exploded City in which a three dimensional model is reconstructed in an attempt to catch the city before the explosion. Ögüt’s work demands from us a questioning of the relation between constructed (official) and public histories. We are asked to find meaning in the middle of an accelerated wave of ‘condensed’ modernism and to determine the underlying (or concealed) violence and oppression.In Cennetoglu’s photography-based works, the question of reality and fiction in the documentary is problematised. This is achieved through the re-creation of reality, a structuring of subjectively ambiguous information and a search for the possibility of potentiality of this uncertain zone. Her work Catalog is presented in the form of a mail order catalogue; during the show, the viewer is invited to freely download her images. Basak Senova is planning to build a separate pavilion in the middle of Arsenale. It is designed to be a modest and straightforward, independent building at the Arsenale. The project is accompanied by a three-volume book series. The first volume is on the conceptual framework, the process and the spatial design; the second functions as the source book, consisting of philosophical articles and edited by the Lebanese artist and filmmaker Jalal Toufic; and the third consists of case studies. This multi-levelled curatorial approach to the Turkish pavilion is intended to trigger an extended discussion on the status of images and after-images.Pelin Tan