As above so below, so can the city be mapped by looking at the sky above it?
If the city is a body, does it have a psyche too?
Is the whole of the city greater than the sum of its parts?
A stroll around İstanbul...
--- There is a primaveral point, at the intersection of celestial and terrestrial, mystical and digital, ancient and post-modern, I will meet you there.
Turning Points / Pontos de Viragem
Between gesture and resistance, body and landscape, the works in Turning Points trace the intimate geographies of two young multidisciplinary artists — Sara Massa (Portugal) and Berfin Alyeşil (Turkey) whose visions meet across time and memory.
Sara Massa’s Forbidden to Touch the Cow, Waiting for War to End, and One Idea move between the physical and the conceptual, reflecting on care, endurance, and the female condition. Her accompanying performance Reviralha reclaims a silenced history: through a hybrid garment that becomes both skirt and trousers, she reimagines women’s resistance under the Salazar dictatorship as a slow choreography of defiance.
Berfin Alyeşil’s Primaveral Point and Run extend this dialogue toward the East, mapping the city as a sentient being and revisiting collective rituals and memories marked by displacement and survival. Her gaze intertwines the celestial and the terrestrial, the mystical and the political, where memory is never static but always in motion.
Together, these works speak of transformation, the act of turning around, re-signifying, and moving forward. Between Portugal and Turkey, the personal becomes political, and the image becomes a gesture of freedom.
Text by Alexia Alexandropoulou
