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Dismantling the Archive: Representation, Identity, Memory in an Ottoman Family at SALT Galata is the fifth in the series of open archive exhibitions, an often understated component of SALT’s programming. SALT has displayed four archives since the institution opened, ranging from an Armenian female studio photographer’s complete archive of photographs to It was a time of conversation, a reevaluation of three exhibitions from the first half of the 1990s.

The current show brings us the personal archive of Mehmet Said Bey (1865-1928): an educated, perhaps somewhat typical middle-class man, who teaches at the high school he himself graduated from and sometimes translated texts for the palace. In short, he is not specifically distinguished, nor un-distinguished. He is a meticulous man, taking notes of what he did and how he spent his money in his many diaries. Mehmet Said Bey’s diaries reflect a family’s routine, nothing more, nothing less and this information on the daily goings-on of a household is precisely what makes his archive appealing. The normalcy and the nondescript nature of his domestic life bring to light that which normally goes unacknowledged because it is under-recorded or understudied, or a mixture of both. Most archives deemed worthy of storage and display, deal with larger things than daily spending and family routines.

A second aspect of the Mehmet Said Bey archive is visual: text- and object-based information revealing cultural, social, and political information of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century period. The music that Mehmet Said Bey listened to, his spending on French lessons, the movies he watched with his wife, all these details tell a story that is specific for a certain time and place but also connect him to the viewers of the exhibition. Because the mundane nature of the archive includes the viewers and allows them to become invested in the archive. It also fills some gaps between recorded, historical events and non-events that constitute the daily life of most people.

A final aspect of this exhibition is its specific installation and design by Future Anecdotes, a collaboration between Asli and Can Altay. Through their interventions, that include the use of household curtains and smell, the exhibition becomes charged with domesticity. The space is compartmentalized through flowy curtains that heighten the feeling of being made privy to secrets and intimate, personal information. The partial privacy offered by the curtains also furthers this feeling of discovering things.

On the curtains, two animations are projected that serve to illustrate and open up the archive—an unexpected entry point through a medium that is not necessarily associated with archival research. The simple presence of these playful animations brings the central issue of the exhibition to the forefront: any archive is what it is interpreted to be, always specific to time and place and the representing institution. SALT’s self-awareness on this topic of the subjectivity of any archival presentation, brings humility and elegance to their research.

While it is impossible to re-create the context from which this archive is derived, the exhibition succeeds in giving viewers the sense of entering a different space and time. The inclusion of French in the wall texts, for example, heightens our awareness of the archive’s Francophone nature.

SALT is not an institute or museum of contemporary art, it is an institution of research. In the current climate of contemporary art, driven by research, I can’t help but think about what it means to exhibit an archive. The agencies and authorships involved, in addition to the ethical and formal concerns, orbit archive-driven research and the implied institutional custodianship. The constantly changing scales and contexts that SALT works with thus becomes a critical framework for this particular exhibition, which interrogates the inherent dynamics of this type of research.

Dismantling the Archive: Representation, Identity, Memory in an Ottoman Family
SALT
Istiklal Caddesi 136
Beyo?lu 34430 Istanbul
Türkiye
From January 21 till March 23, 2014