Doug Aitken: Naked City

Doug Aitken’s first solo exhibition in Türkiye, Naked City at Borusan Contemporary, brings together seven artworks spanning from 2006 to 2024, creating a journey through the Haunted Mansion’s architecture. Curated by Jérôme Sans, the show particularly focuses on cities while all works of art explore the modern condition and the paradoxical isolation in today’s hyperconnected world.

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.

Created 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. 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. The permanent work commissioned by Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, Ascending Staircase (2024) is Aitken’s continuously shape-shifting sculpture that further explores the idea of motion. Built from a column of intersecting reflective discs, the piece 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, the piece from Borusan Contemporary Art Collection don’t think twice II (2006) demonstrates two overlapping, expanding, and concentric circles of fluorescent light. In a choreography of light, this work is like a timepiece one can fall into.

First shown outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it covered the museum’s exterior walls with projections, after seventeen years sleepwalkers (2007) is presented here for the first time in an interior setting. 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.

Located at the historic building known as the Haunted Mansion, Borusan Contemporary is an institution devoted to contemporary art that provides a multi-platform program of exhibitions, events, and educational activities based on the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection. The institution promotes the production of new artworks and publications through commissions and acquisitions since 2011.