Mike Nelson's Kafkaesque Installation Transforms Istanbul's Gürtün Han

Mike Nelson's exhibition 'Projektör (Gürtün Han)' with Protocinema in Istanbul ran from 2 May to 1 June 2019, occupying the seventh floor of the modernist Gürtün Han building. The installation transformed vacant offices and storerooms, once part of Istanbul's declining textile industry, into a labyrinthine environment. Nelson created enigmatic interventions without signage, including whitewashed shopfronts backlit by red glow and makeshift screening rooms showing short videos shot from local taxis. These videos, filmed by the artist over several Istanbul visits, depicted repetitive scenes of drivers' heads, ticking meters, and city streets, projected in various distorted formats like convex mirrors and tinted filters. The experience evoked a sci-fi film noir or abandoned bureaucratic headquarters, with clues hidden amidst clutter like 14-inch monitors in a surveillance-like room and an empty chair in a red-lit office. The work deliberately blurred boundaries between fictional construct and historical record, leaving viewers to piece together incomplete narratives without offering resolution. The exhibition was reviewed in the Summer 2019 issue of ArtReview, noting references to Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film 'Alphaville' in the literature.