About Artwork

Mike Nelson’s photograph, Map (Büyük Valide Han) captures the first moment the artist came face to face with these boxes, crates and portrait of Atatürk hanging above a door of diminutive size. It brought his mind to earlier works, the tableaux acting like a remembered language, taking him back to 1995 and the installation Agent Dickson at the Red Star Hotel. However it also pointed to a future, to the work he  would make for the Istanbul Biennial 2003, MAGAZIN (Büyük Valide Han), then to its reincarnation in the 2011 Venice Biennale, I, IMPOSTOR, and then back again to Istanbul for PROJEKTÖR (Gürün Han) with Protocinema in 2019. This work is shown as a poster, and can be displayed folded or unfolded – the creases apparent, like an old map. Its ideas and physicality make this image into an object which is what the work ultimately was, folding in and out of focus, image/object… and back again.