Type: Exhibition
Year: 2023
Size: 275 m²
Location: Ankara
Client: Lokomotif Kültür Sanat
Team: Yasemin D. Karaca, Asude A. Yılmaz, Ömer Talha Uğur
Status: Completed
Photos: Dilara Karadağ

During the First World War, countless Turkish soldiers were taken prisoner across distant fronts, while many foreign soldiers were held captive within Ottoman lands. Their only means of reaching their families was through letters, carried under the auspices of the Hilal-i Ahmer — today’s Turkish Red Crescent. Yet, many of these letters never reached their destinations. A century later, retrieved from the Red Crescent archives, these long-lost messages are now being handed to the descendants of their intended recipients, and presented to the collective memory of society.

The spatial design of the exhibition reflects this delayed remembrance and fragile memory. Monumental typographies, enlarged manuscripts, and light falling on dark backgrounds transform the intimacy of handwriting into a shared architectural experience. As visitors move through the panels, they encounter archival photographs bearing the weight of war on one side, and on the other, letters that once remained behind barbed wires, now revealed anew.

The space engages not only with the documents themselves but also with the emotions they carry. Semi-transparent surfaces and enlarged textures of century-old paper materialize the endurance of waiting across generations. In doing so, the exhibition disrupts the illusion that history swallows everything; voices silenced a hundred years ago resound once again within the architecture of the present.