ORBIT OF INNOCENCE, SPIRAL OF MEMORIES
EXHIBITED ILLUSTRATION, MARCH - MAY 2023
My artwork titled “Orbit of Innocence, Spiral of Memories” which I illustrated in the light of Nobel Laureate author Orhan Pamuk’s novel “The Museum of Innocence”, for the international exhibition “Transforming Literary Places”, has been selected and exhibited at the University of Tartu Art Museum, Estonia, between March 28th – May 18th 2024.
The exhibition has been organized by Estonia’s University of Tartu Art Museum and Cultural Research Institute, as a part of the European Capital of Culture Tartu 2024 official program.
MY POST ON INSTAGRAM
"Spiral of Memories, Orbit of Innocence", Serra Ataman, 2024
In Nobel Laureate author Orhan Pamuk’s novel, “The Museum of Innocence”, Kemal, the protagonist, says in Physics, Aristotle makes a distinction between “Time” and singular moments he defines as “present”. Single moments –like Aristotle’s atoms– are indivisible things. But Time is the line that links these indivisible moments.
Kemal’s character compares his experiences to a spiral, as story draws ever-growing circles around a center resembling an atomic nucleus. Therefore, he realized the line of Time connecting these singular moments should be spiral, not straight.
Butterfly earring, which Pamuk associates with character Füsun, whom Kemal obsessively love, appears repetitively as an important motif both throughout the novel and in the museum. Spiral pattern of wings of the butterfly, reminds us of the orbit of an atomic model and the cyclicality of Time.
Pamuk’s novel and the museum he created parallel to it, is a universe where words turn into things, time into space, space into memories, and memories into the present moment through the objects and the place they’re in. This universe, where reality and fiction melt into each other, is the museum where Kemal collects and exhibits everything, like a black hole, about Füsun.
Pamuk transforms a literary text into Istanbul and vice versa. If a person has lived in a city for a long time, the city itself has turned into a museum, whole city into a kind of memory. In this context, our mind maps are perhaps the projections of the signs we encounter on the actual map of the city we live in.