Parallel Narratives
Parallelotopias Exhibition, Cultural Centre of the National Bank of Greece
Thesaloniki, Greece
Curated by Gabriel Koureas
Four desks with chairs, eight copies of Orhan Pamouk’s book Memories of a City
Dimensions Variable
2012
The exhibition [Parallelotopias] greets the visitor with Parallel Narratives, a group of old school desks reclaimed from the past lives of the city and on which copies of Pamuk’s book are placed. The visitor is invited to participate in what the Turkish author initiated with his book in uncovering the richness of multi-cultural Ottoman Constantinople through its ruined mansions and dark alleys. The visitor is asked to tell their stories in order to reveal the memories of the city, which are entangled with that of Constantinople and the fate of the Ottoman Empire. This re-writing of memory reveals its malleability and often the abuses that can be inflicted on it by selective remembering and forgetting. (Parallelotopias, Gabriel Koureas, Birkbeck College, University of London)
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