Roundtable & Exhibition: As We Used to Spell

As words extend faster and further into public and personal spaces than ever before, they reclaim their agency in real time, as spells. The operative power of phrases, prompts, and protests over our lives is at the center of this exhibition and research project, which explores how emergent and residual spell practices act through embodied and spatial forms.

The exhibition takes place at Barın Han, a modernist building in Çemberlitaş/ Istanbul that housed the printing and bookbinding workshop of Emin Barın, a renowned Turkish artist and calligrapher with ties to the historic Bauhaus and the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts. In this context, As We Used to Spell offers a critical reflection on modernist “truths”, those spells of techno-rationalism that continue to shape how we think, speak, and build. It investigates how these truths-for (Sylvia Wynter) are continuously spatialized through bodily and machinic reproductions and repetitions. Their loops sustain a logic of patriarchal capitalist extraction and, at the same time, provoke transformations, whether pragmatic, poetic, or parodic.

Through various collaborations, As We Used to Spell seeks emancipatory and transformative practices of “spelling” that question systems of domination while invoking everyday lore, generosity, and humor. The first part of this long-term research-based project is conceived by Aslı Serbest and Mona Mahall, together with Emma Waltraud Howes.

The opening of the exhibition will take place as part of a Roundtable-Talk with Banu Cennetoğlu, Begüm Özden Fırat, Merve Elveren, Mona Mahall, Meriç Öner and Aslı Serbest on 06.11.2025 at 5:00p.m. The exhibition is open daily except Mondays from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Aslı Serbest and Mona Mahall (Berlin) work across spatial, image, sound, and textual practices to examine and rethink the (re-)production of our public and personal spaces and their implied power relations.

Banu Cennetoğlu (Istanbul) evolves her artistic practice around the appropriation, classification, and circulation of data, images, and knowledge that shape our collective thinking and shared ideologies.

Begüm Özden Fırat (Istanbul) researches art histories, visual cultures, and social movements, uncovering how images, archives, and cultural theories shape and are shaped by power relations and forms of resistance.

Merve Elveren (Istanbul) works at the intersection of curatorial practice, publications, and research, with a focus on the socio-cultural landscape of the 1980s and 1990s in Turkey and its influence on our inherited imaginaries and collective memory.

Meriç Öner (Istanbul) researches and curates exhibitions on material cultures, built environments, and deferred knowledges of everyday life that help question and re-form systems of distribution and care.

This project is supported by the Alumni Fund of the Kulturakademie Tarabya.