Haunted

Curated by Dr. Kumru Eren.

Borusan Contemporary presents Haunted, a new collection exhibition exploring how artificial intelligence, algorithms, data technologies, and digital culture are transforming the ways images are produced, perceived, and remembered. Bringing together works from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Memo Akten, teamLab, Quayola, Zimoun, DRIFT, Marco Brambilla, Daniel Canogar, and Kemal Önsoy, the exhibition considers a visual culture in which the boundaries between human and machine, physical and digital, reality and simulation are increasingly difficult to distinguish. Haunted will be on view in parallel with Time Space Geometry, the first solo exhibition in Türkiye by Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri. 

Rather than treating technology simply as a medium, Haunted focuses on the ways computational systems increasingly participate in the production of images and in the shaping of perception itself. The works move across artificial intelligence, machine learning, interactive systems, algorithmic processes, robotics, sound, light, and moving image, tracing a shift from the image as representation toward the image as an evolving system. Within this field, questions of authorship, memory, subjectivity, and reality become increasingly unstable.

The exhibition brings together distinct approaches to this transformation. Memo Akten works with artificial intelligence, deep learning, and collective intelligence to create speculative environments that reconsider consciousness, nature, and the consequences of technological systems. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer turns bodies, data, architecture, and responsive technologies into materials for participation, making the viewer’s presence part of the work. teamLab similarly dissolves the boundaries between artwork, viewer, and environment through immersive digital worlds that continuously respond to their surroundings. Quayola uses computational processes to reinterpret both art-historical forms and natural phenomena, while Zimoun creates kinetic environments from simple mechanical systems, repetition, sound, and industrial materials. DRIFT explores the behaviour of natural systems through interactive technologies, and Marco Brambilla reassembles fragments of cinema and popular culture into immersive moving-image environments. Daniel Canogar, meanwhile, transforms digital information into dynamic spatial experiences. 

Alongside these technology-driven practices, Haunted includes works on paper by Kemal Önsoy, whose layered surfaces move between figuration and abstraction. His presence introduces another temporality into the exhibition: one grounded in material, gesture, accumulation, and the physical act of making an image. Placed in dialogue with computational and machine-generated forms, Önsoy’s works open a longer history of representation and raise a simple but urgent question: what happens to the image when its production is no longer exclusively human?

The title Haunted draws on the history of Perili Köşk (the Haunted Mansion), the historic mansion overlooking the Bosphorus that has been home to Borusan Contemporary since 2011. Once known as the Yusuf Ziya Paşa Mansion, the building remained unfinished after construction was interrupted during the First World War, and its incomplete upper floors gave rise to the name by which it became known locally. In Haunted, this architectural history is reimagined through a contemporary form of haunting—not by ghosts from the past, but by invisible systems of data, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine processes that increasingly shape everyday life. 

At the centre of the exhibition is a question that becomes more urgent as machines learn to perceive, process, and generate images: what does it mean to be human in a world increasingly mediated by nonhuman intelligence? Haunted follows the traces of a future that is already beginning to inhabit the present. At Perili Köşk, the ghost takes on a new form—not an apparition from the past, but an invisible technological presence whose effects are increasingly impossible to ignore. 

About Borusan Contemporary
Borusan Contemporary is a contemporary art, collection, and education initiative of the Borusan Kocabıyık Foundation. Since 2011, it has presented exhibitions, commissions, events, and educational programs centred on the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, the only collection in Türkiye to be a member of IACCCA (International Association of Corporate Collections of Contemporary Art), with a particular focus on new media and technology-based artistic practices.