Eren İnönü brings together his photographs of chimneys, which he describes as the city’s “unseen monuments,” at Galeri Işık Teşvikiye.
The exhibition “Unseen Monuments” can be visited until Saturday, Nov 1.
Inspired by the industrial typology approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who are known for systematically and objectively photographing industrial structures, water towers, mine chimneys, warehouses, silos, and other factory buildings, İnönü reinterprets this objective view through his own aesthetic perspective, positioning the chimneys in black-and-white frames reaching toward the sky.
Architect and artist Buşra Tunç’s spatial design adds an experiential dimension to the exhibition.
We spoke with Eren İnönü about his exhibition, the chimneys he photographed, and his reasons for choosing to view the city from this perspective.
Ovaakça Natural Gas Combined Cycle Plant, Bursa, 2012.
The unseen monuments of the city
Was there a personal or visual moment that led you to the question, “Why do chimneys remain standing while everything else is torn down?”
The answer to that question is actually hidden in Casa Mila in Barcelona, in 2009. When I looked at Gaudi’s chimneys, I realized how an ordinary technical element could be transformed into an architectural expression. Then I looked back at my own past—as someone who worked in the burner industry for 40 years and saw hundreds of chimney designs and installations, I reconsidered the functional and symbolic meanings of these structures.
After the demolitions of factories and thermal power plants in İstanbul, I noticed that the chimneys always remained standing. Maybe that’s why the question “while everything is being torn down” became not a curiosity, but an awareness born from observation.
You position chimneys as a kind of “unseen monument” of the city. Can you elaborate on the word “monument”?
To me, the word monument always carries two meanings: one is to remember, the other is to forget.
Some monuments speak of heroism; others quietly mark the end of an era. Chimneys are like that. On one hand, they represent warmth, labor, and production; on the other, the exhaustion and depletion left behind by the industrial age. For me, these chimneys have already earned the right to be called monuments through their invisibility. They still carry an unremembered past up toward the sky.
Source: BIANET
