Nominator: Iris Nela

Nominator's statement

Between scales. Her designs combine the latent potentials of space, light, and material with scenographic narratives.

CAN ALKOR LIBRARY

This project was developed in honor of  the late poet, translator, and mathematician Can Alkor. Its architecture borrows from the quiet persistence of climbing vines, reimagined as industrial joints that weave through a grid of poles and shelves. Each joint stabilizes and animates the system, extending to the floor, ceiling, corners, and thresholds, binding the system together through finding support in unexpected places.

Each iron joint  was produced through manual spring-making, in a shared authorship between the machine and the hand, polished to clarity yet left with the discreet traces of its making. The system thrives on the balance of calculation and improvisation, the mathematical and  poème are folded into one another. As a result, no two elements are identical. A transparent varnish seal leaves these marks visible while allowing time to etch its own patina through slow oxidation underneath.

TUNSTATE EXHIBITION DESIGN

The scenography of TUNSTATE exhibition at İmalat-hane Art space in the industrial area of Bursa, was developed in close dialogue with its artist Aslı Çavuşoğlu and structured around the expressive use of paper tubes - a fully recyclable material more often confined to packaging. In this context, the tubes step into prominence, shaping both the supportive framework and the spatial rhythm of the exhibition, while extending onto the façade to enlarge its architectural reach.

Assembled on-site with the pragmatic logic of scaffolding, these light yet durable elements enabled a construction method that is provisional, adaptive, and precise - amplifying the exhibition’s reflection on precarity, resilience, and temporality. Within Bursa’s industrial fabric, where such tubes usually circulate as auxiliary components of the textile and paper industries, their recontextualization takes on a poetic charge: a gesture toward cyclicality that echoes TunState’s meditation on fragile architectures of transformation and renewal.

KITCHEN WITH NO RECEPTION - EXHIBITION DESIGN

The design of this kitchen-stage, built for TUNCA’s solo exhibition at İMALAT-HANE Art Space, was informed from the artist TUNCA’s practice, and a comprehensive research on the relationship between kitchen as a political arena. At the heart of the upper floor of the art space, it positions the kitchen as a stage for critical reflection, where cultural structures can be dismantled and examined through the artist’s gastronomic performances.

Built in stainless steel, the installation recalls the efficiency of industrial kitchens while probing the deeper politics of order, control, and ideology. Its shiny, polished surfaces reflect the promises and contradictions of equality, collectivity, and utopian ideals, while concealing everything beneath them.

By elevating the kitchen into a scenographic apparatus, the design supports TUNCA’s works that expose how power infiltrates everyday rituals of eating, and how repetition and routine reinforce established norms. Drawing on references that range from Russian Constructivism to Space Age utopias, the installation merges the aesthetics of roundness and centralization with the shadows of authoritarian order.