Last day to see ‘Modern Essays’
“Modern Essays 5: Graft,” an investigation into the geographic, cultural and social impacts of dam lakes in Turkey, has opened at SALT Ulus in Ankara.1930s newspapers in Ankara often published articles and photographs celebrating Ankara’s “seas” and “shores” as “modern recreational spaces of the new capital.” Ankara, at the time, an arid, drought-ridden steppe, was grafted with these “shores” and “seas” which were, in fact, modern hydraulic infrastructures, part of the modernization project of the Turkish Republic. These modern projects of a “modern” geography are cultivars, propagated by grafting an Ottoman scion onto an Anatolian root, as Istanbul’s waterfront geography was grafted onto Ankara’s barren land.
