The Forgotten Day (2025)
Ink on canvas
250 × 800 cm
The Forgotten Day is a daily publication project planned upon the invitation of KABO, which has transformed one of the waiting areas of the Karşıyaka Ferry Terminal into a public exhibition space.
The project uses printed newspapers as its material. Although newspaper circulation has significantly declined in recent years, these publications and the TV channels affiliated with their parent media groups continue to operate in concert to influence the public agenda. As a result, mass media reclaims its position as a central medium through which we follow and interpret current events.
Throughout April, The Forgotten Day scans the front-page headlines and prominent lead stories of approximately fourteen newspapers, each with a daily circulation of over 30,000. From these stories, it removes the names of individuals, countries, and institutions, and transfers the most frequently repeated and agenda-setting words onto a large canvas using carbon paper and ink pens—day by day—fixing them in place.
While printed newspapers connect the past to the present, The Forgotten Day carries both the past and the present into the future. By digesting the headlines of newspapers with differing political leanings, the project distills and permanently marks what remains. The manual transfer of printed news content onto canvas slows down the temporal process, while the hundreds of words extracted from their original contexts remain suspended—isolated—in space. Freed from their sources, these words become open to new associations, narratives, and interpretations, creating a mental playground for passengers waiting at the terminal. The work intersects with people’s daily lives, generating new stories and meanings.
The public nature of the ferry terminal as a transportation hub renders the exhibition space a natural part of the city’s daily rhythm and flow. In a similar way, newspapers embed themselves in the daily cycle by shaping current events, social dynamics, and public discourse.
By detaching front-page headlines and stories from their original contexts and placing them back into circulation, The Forgotten Day forms a statistical word pool around current political issues and behavioral patterns. In this sense, the project can also be read as a panoramic landscape painting constructed day by day—a “landscape of words” belonging not to nature, but to collective memory.
Installation view; Karşıyaka Ferry Terminal, Izmir
photo 3: Gülşen Acar, video: Fatih Bilgin
The following people are involved in producing the project:
Elifnaz Demir, Toprak Begtaş, Talha Demiral, Özlem Bayrak Begtaş, Güneş Arık, Eylül Demirhan, Lara Bekler, Selim Kaya, Duru Başer, Afra Fakir, Derya Bulut Uhri, Arya Biçer, Sultan Gökdemir, Erdem Dağlı, Ayşegül Özer, Cemre Dağlı, Gülşen Acar, Ayça Su Değirmenci, Rıdvan Derya, Ali Haydar Bayır, Yunus Çakırtaş, Havva Korukoğlu, Berk Şenol, Nilüfer Tunay, Melisa Geçalp, Kaan Kuşuluoğlu, Zahid Alhaj, Furkan Beyçiç, Zeynep Sarı, Duygu Yaşlı, Gamze Nur Koç, Berkehan Demir, Mine Uşak, Mehmet Şahutoğulları, Merve Aydar
