By the second week of the Istanbul Biennial, walking the streets every day, I was beginning to feel almost at home in this pulsating metropolis of 17 million people. Frances Goodman and I had steamed and been scrubbed in a hamam, interior designer Yelda Bayraktar had generously introduced me to a hidden world of antique dealers who work behind unmarked doors, and it was time to get down to work.
The young Biennial staff had offered to be part of a workshop to discuss what it meant to them to live in this city as part of my Other Voices Other Cities project. The group finally voted on ISTANBUL IS RELENTLESS As Ceylan Hepis said, ‘one moment you can be having a nice time with your friends in a club, the next, someone has been stabbed on the street’.
We decided to do a night shoot in Taksim Square, a central meeting point. We started with the longest word, RELENTLESS and as we moved on to ISTANBUL the police arrived and told us to stop shooting. I learned they had looked up the meaning of ‘relentless’ on the internet, and were not happy.
A noisy argument followed, with people on the square taking sides, and in the end, the police said it was okay, we could go on. A relief.
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