As We Used to Spell
Series of works, diverse media, research, text, 2025
As words extend faster and further into public and personal spaces than ever before, they reclaim their agency in real time, as spells. The operative power of phrases, prompts, and protests over our lives is at the center of this exhibition and research project, which explores how emergent and residual spell practices act through embodied and spatial forms.
The exhibition takes place at Barın Han, a modernist building in Çemberlitaş/ Istanbul that housed the printing and bookbinding workshop of Emin Barın, a renowned Turkish artist and calligrapher with ties to the historic Bauhaus and the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts. In this context, As We Used to Spell offers a critical reflection on modernist "truths", those spells of techno-rationalism that continue to shape the way we think, speak, and build. It investigates how these "truths-for" (Sylvia Wynter) are continuously spatialized through bodily and machinic reproductions and repetitions. Their loops sustain a logic of patriarchal capitalist extraction and, at the same time, provoke transformations, whether pragmatic, poetic, or parodic.
Through various collaborations, As We Used to Spell seeks emancipatory and transformative spell practices that question systems of domination while invoking everyday lore, generosity, and humor.
