Orhan Pamuk: The Consolation of Objects

While the literary oeuvre of the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has long been appreciated worldwide, his artistic work has so far remained largely unknown.

The exhibition Consolation of Objects for the first time offers insight into Pamuk’s visual, conceptual, and photographic work, which attests to his lifelong passionate interest in the relationship between literature and the visual arts.

The artistic work presented in this exhibition bears references to many of the author’s novels while simultaneously reflecting on the history of Western and Ottoman art, literature, and thought. It is also marked with an unmistakable “Istanbulness” stemming from Pamuk’s complex relationship with his native city and his ongoing artistic research into its turbulent and magnificent past stretching from the Ottoman Empire through the modern Republic of Turkey to the ruins of tradition in the present day. 

At the heart of the exhibition stands Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. This story of the unfulfilled love of Kemal, a rich son of a factory owner, for his charming but poorer cousin Füsun was conceived by its author from the beginning as both a novel and a museum, which opened in Istanbul in 2012. It unfolds here through quotidian objects carefully arranged into numerous “cabinets of curiosities” that reflect everyday life in Istanbul from the 1950s to the 2000s. In these three-dimensional Dadaist-surrealist still lifes, Pamuk plays with the ambiguity of the relationship between word and image, lending them poetic force.

The same artistic approach informs Orhan Pamuk’s latest works, created for this exhibition, in which he enters into an imaginary dialogue with artworks of the old masters and modern painters from the Dresden State Art Collections and the collections of the Lenbachhaus Museum in Munich. These works are both vivid conversations between the worlds of literature and the visual arts and a remarkable dialogue of cultures.

A video triptych by the artist Ali Kazma entitled A House of Ink, which focuses on Orhan Pamuk’s literary and artistic works as well as his studio, library, and extensive archives, will be shown as part of the exhibition. Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini, Milan. 

Curator: Michaela Šilpochová