Artwork
City no.55: Halic Shipyard
2026
Medium
Mix Media
Artist
selcen karatay
Turkey
About the work
City no.52 — Haliç Shipyard reworks the artist’s own black-and-white photographic print from a decade-long archive of the site, developed while working there as an architect before and during its transformation. As the shipyard was gradually replaced by a new and highly polished urban lifestyle, the archive became a way of preserving other possible versions of the place. Acrylic, ink, fabric and stitching shift the image beyond documentation, layering the physical site with memory and surreal possibilities. Rather than reconstructing the past, the work allows one of the many alternative versions of the shipyard to emerge — imagined, perhaps surreal, but in memory sometimes more real than the version that ultimately replaced it.