From Istanbul with love, 2018
Postcard series with handwritten letters

From Istanbul with Love was produced for the 2018 annual exhibition of Darağaç, an İzmir-based non-profit art collective located in the Umurbey neighborhood. As an experimental platform, Darağaç fosters new forms of communication and dialogue across creative disciplines. The neighborhood, historically known as Darağaç, lies between Alsancak Stadium and Halkapınar. Once marked by industrial activity, it has gradually evolved into a site of cultural production shaped by artists, artisans, and local residents, embedded within everyday community life.

The annual exhibition operates through collaborative modes of production, foregrounding social and spatial context as a way to rethink the relationship between art and community, and to approach the neighborhood as a living repository of collective possibility. From Istanbul with Love unfolds as a symbolic gesture of participation in this “communication partnership” between artists and residents, from the position of someone absent from the site.

The work consists of postcards sent by post to members of the Darağaç community—artists, artisans, and local residents. Each card pairs a photograph taken in İzmir, drawn from the artist’s personal archive, with a handwritten letter that traces a distant yet intimate connection to the city, shaped by memory, friendship, and imagination.

Gizem Karakas left the display of the postcards open, granting the Darağaç collective full agency over their form, circulation, and afterlife; the postcards could be exhibited, reproduced, distributed, altered, or destroyed.