İMÇ as a Field of Tension in Istanbul

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This article was originally published in Turkish by Unlimited

There is a silent conflict embedded in İMÇ’s architectural body and the gentrification of the public sphere in Istanbul

The Istanbul Textile Traders’ Market (İMÇ), designed in the late 1950s by architects Doğan Tekeli, Sami Sisa, and Metin Hepgüler, was conceived not only as a commercial center but also as a modernist public space. In line with the ideological modernization project of the early Republic, it sought to integrate art into architecture, aiming to discipline public life through visual culture. A regulation passed in the 1960s, which mandated that a portion of public building budgets be reserved for artworks, institutionalized this approach. The mosaics of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, the ceramic panels of Füreya Koral, and the sculptures of Kuzgun Acar became the aesthetic carriers of this project. These works were designed to cultivate the urban population through visual culture. İMÇ thus emerged as a pedagogical stage—charged both aesthetically and ideologically. Public art here functioned as a means of shaping the citizen and inscribing class distinctions into space. It carried the weight of class, discipline, and the imagination of the modern citizen.

Yet this idealist vision of the public sphere fractured against the messy realities of material life. After the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, the building evolved into a more complex spatial fabric populated by artisans and small tradesmen. First it became a hub for record companies, then gradually transformed into a commercial complex consisting of small businesses. With the arrival of the 2007 Istanbul Biennial and subsequent art initiatives, İMÇ’s profile was reshaped once again. But instead of intersecting with the building’s historical function and class fabric, this new phase turned the site into a field of representation—an aestheticized and gentrified arena. Art ceased to be an integrated component of the space and became instead a tool for fencing it off.

Open studios, closed encounters

The move of SAHA Association –a cultural capital initiative by the Eczacıbaşı business dynasty– into the building last year officially marked this new era. Today, under the guidance of the artists who have taken up studios here, exhibitions, site-specific installations, talks, public workshops, and open studio days are organized. The complex has even been praised as a site of “creative resistance”. Yet as artist studios settled in and the space was recoded through aesthetic representation, a silent process of gentrification began to unfold. It may not yet be complete, but compared to the building’s historical uses, the transformation is evident. For decades, İMÇ was defined by collective production and craftwork, populated by a particular economic class. Today it is being repositioned onto a new plane of symbolic value and discourse, altering not just the building’s function but its meaning.

Most events organized by art initiatives here pay little attention to the daily rhythms of the complex. They revolve instead around themes that highlight the site’s quirkiness and "openness to encounters”. Unsurprisingly, most visitors come from the art world itself. As a result, the building—while theoretically open to all—becomes epistemically, aesthetically, and emotionally closed off to many. İMÇ is reframed as a place that has to be “discovered” by people who would not otherwise have reason to enter. This exoticizing gaze allows both artists and visitors to approach the complex from the outside, turning it into a gallery space while relegating its inhabitants to the background. For art audiences, an encounter with the shopkeepers’ everyday life becomes akin to anthropological observation.

What, then, does “public” mean in the so-called public art staged in İMÇ? Here “public” does not signify an unpredictable, risk-bearing social actor who might intervene, but rather a distant, reflective, non-intervening observer—closer to the profile of a museum visitor, someone who will not lose control in their encounter with art. Such events, despite their claims of openness and encounter, reproduce a very specific figure: one who interprets but does not touch, who observes but does not participate, who thinks but does not intervene. In these representations, openness is imagined as a shared ground of meaning for those with cultural capital—where insiders affirm each other and outsiders are excluded. In this sense, a form of “public discipline” continues through art. Yet a truly open space is unpredictable, contradictory, messy, and at times irritating. Works shown there should expect not only ownership and recognition but also rejection, misunderstanding, even hostility. Such responses should not be dismissed as vandalism or ignorance but seen as traces of genuine public encounters with art. From this perspective, İMÇ’s current use exposes the limits of art that claims to be public.

Whose memory?

Alongside İMÇ’s new residents, a nostalgic discourse has grown around the works of Bedri Rahmi, Füreya, and Acar still embedded in the building. As soon as contemporary “high art” practices entered the space, these earlier works began to be revalued as “treasures neglected by the state and the people.” This nostalgic gaze gains legitimacy through the representational power of institutional art’s official presence in the building. Yet these works, though once part of an ideological aesthetic regime, had over time worn down, faded, and entered into different kinds of relations with everyday life. The nostalgic discourse, however, frames this natural weathering as a “loss,” reproducing contemporary structures of classed representation. Monumentalization under the name of “cultural heritage” freezes these works in time, demanding preservation instead of allowing them to decay and resonate with daily life—foreclosing potential contemporary interventions. “Preservation” thus becomes less about memory and more about redrawing the boundaries of aesthetic privilege.

Over the years, art historians, preservation boards, municipalities, and cultural managers have re-coded these works as pieces of the cultural archive. In the process, the incidental relations shopkeepers, visitors, and children once had with them become invisible, devalued. Past encounters are narrated in a nostalgic and exclusionary language of “decay” or “neglect.” Value now lies only in what can be documented and exhibited. At this point, we see how the concept of “heritage” blurs the line between preservation and appropriation. A quick search online reveals, for example, how Füreya Koral’s work on the wall has been shamed for being partly covered by a signboard for a rice shop.

The disappearance of a work as revelation of the non-public

A striking case illustrating this frame occurred in late 2024, when an artwork at İMÇ was lost/stolen. İrem Günaydın’s piece, a graffiti-style spray-painted statement on a large lightbox reading “I too am not a Studio Artist,” disappeared shortly after being installed on a wall. According to Günaydın, no explanation was given, surveillance footage was inaccessible, and no one assumed responsibility.

The disappearance sparked reactions of “intolerance to art” and “censorship.” But perhaps, despite all its bureaucratic opacity, the incident points us toward a different understanding of the public. Public space is not a protected exhibition hall but a surface where conflict, disappearance, forgetting, and neglect are normalized. From this angle, the loss of the work is not vandalism or censorship but an inherent possibility of the public realm. In fact, perhaps the moment the piece vanished was the moment it became most truly public. The reactions surrounding the event, however, revealed that art is still imagined as a privileged object to be “protected.” Of course, one should not conflate systematic censorship with public uncertainty—but a work that claims to touch different classes must accept not only visibility but also disappearance and intervention. Such interventions often expose the limits of an art practice that can only imagine the public in terms of representation.

Günaydın herself had earlier expressed surprise and joy that her piece resonated with İMÇ’s working-class community. Yet once it disappeared, she and others adopted a “stolen artwork” discourse framed through the triangle of artist, institution, and organizer. This revealed not only the fragility of public art but also the contradictions in the artist’s own position. If the work truly touched the outside world, should not its disappearance also be seen as part of that encounter? More broadly, we see how theoretical language around “reaching beyond the institution” often circles back into internal narratives that address only the high-art milieu. The relationships working people or ordinary passersby forge with art are rarely acknowledged as encounters in their own right, but rather instrumentalized as anecdotes that legitimize the artist’s cultural capital and once again address elite art audiences.

Why does an artwork immediately acquire meaning, status, and untouchability when placed on a wall? Why is a sentence dropped into public space expected to be understood by all, and any intervention upon it interpreted as “vandalism”? Public space doesn’t have a contractual obligation to exalt art. On the contrary, it is the space that renders art ordinary. Meanings, objects, and sentences may all disappear there. Perhaps public art becomes most truly public precisely in that uncontrolled moment of disappearance. Once an artwork enters the public realm, the artist can no longer dictate how it will be received. Circulating “among the people,” it will inevitably encounter classed, cultural, and aesthetic readings beyond the artist’s intention. This does not threaten art’s autonomy; rather, it exposes its public nature. Artists must accept that their works may be experienced in different ways—and that encounters with the public may involve rejection, mockery, neglect, or even violence.

Interventions or indifference directed at an artwork in shared space should not be seen as a lack of value or as “the people’s ignorance of art,” but rather as forms of relation shaped by social and cultural inequalities. Institutional and artistic reactions to such cases reveal a double contradiction: on the one hand, they show what happens when art truly becomes public, and on the other, they expose the artist’s intolerance of this uncertainty. This tension marks a boundary: when art truly descends into the public realm, it risks losing its privileged status. Yet this very risk is often instrumentalized—through discourses of “theft,” “damage,” or “disrespect”—to re-legitimize art’s enclosure within sterile representational frames.

For decades, the artworks on İMÇ’s walls endured rust, cigarette smoke, sunlight, and rain—appearing to some as pleasant images, to others as mere decoration. Today, however, a discourse circulates calling for them to be protected. One cannot help but ask: why should an artwork placed on a textile trader’s wall be thought of with the seriousness of a museum piece? If art that claims to be public still addresses only the sensitivities of a particular class, producing a sanctity closed off to intervention, then it merely serves to keep high-art audiences talking among themselves. What may “happen” to artworks, however, must be accepted as the cost of their truly public existence.

For this reason, what happened to Günaydın’s work reopens a crucial question about the aesthetic, political, and social nature of the public realm: whose memory is cultural memory? Perhaps memory is also constituted by what is forgotten. Perhaps the theft of an artwork is, paradoxically, the strongest proof that it was ever truly public. If we see it as something that must be protected, then maybe it was never for everyone—since the public realm belongs to what is unowned, uncontrollable: everyone’s and no one’s.

Conclusion: Don’t be Afraid! It’s Us, the People

The historical trajectory of the Istanbul Textile Traders’ Market is not only a story of architectural and functional transformation, but also a concrete example of how the public sphere is continually redefined. Built with a modernist vision, İMÇ became a carrier of elitist cultural codes, and today, reframed through contemporary art practices, it is turning into a representational site that speaks only to a narrow cultural milieu.

The new era, shaped around open studios, disappearing works, and discourses of “preservation,” carries a paradoxical identity: one that excludes the public while branding itself in the name of public art, one that treats genuine encounters—contact, intervention, risk—as threats. Yet the public realm is public only insofar as it remains open to unpredictability, conflict, intervention, and disappearance. An artwork may still be public when touched, transformed, or even stolen. For art to claim a public existence, it must open itself to the ground where labor is not only produced but tested through social relations. If art is to sustain a public claim, it must face the everyday, classed, and affective encounters that arise around it. This is not a sign of art’s devaluation, but of its social life.