Çaylak Sokak at Çaylak Sokak

“Çaylak Sokak” (Çaylak Street) is the title of a seminal installation by Sarkis, which borrows its name from the street in the Talimhane district of Istanbul, where Sarkis was born and raised. With its images belonging to the past, childhood, the home, family, and growing up, this installation is one of the cornerstones of both Sarkis’s art practice and the history of contemporary art in Turkey. Sarkis settled in Paris in 1966. When he came to Istanbul 20 years later in 1986 to install his exhibition at the Maçka Art Gallery, he wanted to build his work out of his personal memories of his family house and the street where he was born and raised. Each object in “Çaylak Sokak” is borrowed from that house and that street, and they all share a common history: a cobbler’s workbench belonging to his Uncle Simon, with whom Sarkis worked as an apprentice when he was a child; a tube radio borrowed from Aunt Siranuş; the enamelled bathtub in which the children of the family bathed for years, after which it was used to grow tomatoes; his father’s shoes, the vulture figurine that was always present in the house since his childhood. The magnetic tapes connecting them are audiotapes from Tarkovsky’s film “Nostalghia”. When “Çaylak Sokak” was invited to the “Magicians of the Earth” (1989) exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris after its first presentation in Istanbul, Sarkis installed the work on a wooden platform there, with identical dimensions to the layout of the Maçka Art Gallery, in order to convey the memory of the original place where it was first shown.

After being displayed in Paris in 1989, the objects in the “Çaylak Sokak” installation were returned to the house where Sarkis was born in Istanbul, remaining in that house until the work became part of the Arter Collection. In the film “Çaylak Sokak at Çaylak Sokak”, Sarkis recorded the life of the installation in the house.

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