Digital Audio Guide

Doug Aitken’s first solo exhibition in Türkiye, Naked City at Borusan Contemporary, exceptionally brings together artworks spanning from 2006 to 2024, creating a journey through the building’s architecture. Since the 1990s, the internationally renowned American artist has been pushing the boundaries of the forms in which art can exist, scrutinizing the intricacies and ambivalence of modern life and hyper-connectivity, the meaning of freedom in the age of neoliberal globalization and its possible consequences on isolation, as well as the increasingly porous relationship between humans and technology. By placing people at the heart of his stories, with experiences that confront the individual with the landscape and with others, he infuses his work with a humanist dimension. Aitken’s artworks border on the sublime. They capture and recreate shared moments of grace and awe.

Four years after the global outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, which unprecedently brought the world to a halt, this exhibition is an investigation of humanity’s inherent disposition for mobility and its unfolding development in contemporary society. Particularly focusing on cities, the works all explore the modern condition and the paradoxical isolation of today’s hyperconnected world. Between motion and immobility, extreme speed and slowness, connection and solitude, these works examine how one navigates the urban, physical, digital, and emotional landscapes of our time. Speaking of loneliness, erasure within the enormous mass of sprawling megacities, and the boundless digital ocean, the exhibition thus questions the direction of humanity, responding to today’s new ways of communicating, connecting, perceiving, and being.

Made during the pandemic, the three-screen film installation Flags and Debris (2021) and the textile work Digital Detox (2020) reflect upon the disruptive period of quarantine, which, for the first time in modern history, allowed for a global standstill—a moment of silence and respite amidst the otherwise incessant, overflowing flux of information and people. Aitken worked with materials found in his own home, which he carefully sowed and fashioned together to create handmade wall hangings. In this act of sewing together and repairing, the artist empowers the debris of these fabrics to the state of flags that he then brandishes in the urban landscape or wraps around dancing bodies in the empty city. Within these post-apocalyptic settings devoid of human presence, in the naked towns, which constituted the world for the first part of 2020, dancers take the streets and activate the city with kinetic energy.

Predating the pandemic but touching upon similar problematics of connection, 3 Modern Figures (don’t forget to breathe) (2018) presents three isolated, static glowing figures, tightly grasping an empty portion of space where a phone should be. With changing hues of light pulsating within their bodies, the figures are both physically isolated and intimately interconnected through these internal rhythms. Standing like relics, frozen in the phone-holding position that has come to define our era, these figures exemplify the new age where the boundary between body and digital is progressively blurred.

Aptly placed in the passageway from one floor to the next of the museum, his photographic series windows (2007) shows anonymous characters seen by train or airplane windows, focusing on the in-between spaces of traveling. Like the digital screens of today, these windows onto the world are also the embodiment of the daily motionless voyages of the virtual era.

Aitken’s continuously shape-shifting sculpture Ascending Staircase (2024) further explores the idea of motion. Built from a column of intersecting reflective discs, this permanent work commissioned for Borusan Contemporary rotates slowly, defying the static, fixed tradition of art. Amid today’s accelerated rhythm, the work serves as a way of slowing down, creating constantly renewed, unexpected experiences and pulling the viewer back into immediate, real-time engagement.

Moving continuously and proceeding through an animated sequence, don’t think twice II (2006) is made of two overlapping, expanding, and concentric circles of fluorescent light. By focusing on the circular motif, the artist examines the circle as a symbol of continuous motion and as the archetype of nonhierarchical, democratic, and shared spaces. In a choreography of light, this work is like a timepiece one can fall into.

Following Aitken’s investigation on mobility and nonlinearity, sleepwalkers (2007) presents the life of five protagonists as they move around New York City and whose stories are woven within a fragmented narrative. Operating in a syncopated rhythm, the screens of the installation switch between characters, splicing and collaging fragmentary scenes from their stories to reveal the similarities and resonances between routines that at first seem far removed from one another.