PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB

Initiated by VitrA and the Turkish Association of Architects in Private Practice (TSMD), the VitrA Contemporary Architecture Series aimed to document and discuss the contemporary architectural context in Turkey and create a basis for new work by focusing on different building types. Five exhibitions took place within the series between 2012 and 2016. Public programs and film screenings accompanied the exhibitions, bringing different perspectives on the subjects into view and exploring their further implications.

The second exhibition in the series, Please Do Not Disturb, evoked holiday spaces while establishing a connection with tourism structures at an abstract level. For the exhibition, Istanbul Modern’s pop-up exhibition space was divided into rooms, creating a sequence of isolated atmospheres.

From the exhibition text:

“The exhibition takes its name from an object we all know. It is a long, thin, 20-centimetre-long piece of cardboard, with writing on both sides, which you thread through the door handle using the hole at the top. It is a means of communication through which holidaymakers announce their state of mind at the door. It is the same all over the world. It is one of the most iconic objects of the standardised, mass-market holiday experience. On the one hand, it represents the homogenisation of the holiday industry, tourism services, and customer demands; on the other, it is a polite rebellion against the everyday routines that people hope to escape when dreaming of a holiday, only to find them there as well: Please Do Not Disturb. The exhibition contains neither the object itself nor a photograph of it. Yet I would say that its underlying meanings permeate the exhibition.”

“The rooms within the exhibition space, each specially designed for a particular artist, effectively create a ‘gallery within a gallery.’ Five young artists, who express their creativity through works produced outside their usual fields, offer a different experience in each gallery with pieces created specifically for this exhibition.”

“A holiday is a dream, and like any dream, it is bought and sold. Whether it is a two-room guesthouse or a mega-resort, the holiday setting is carefully calibrated to the guest’s needs and isolated accordingly. As the guest moves about during the holiday, they pass through scenes that accompany their movements. The holiday is staged, and the guest takes the lead.”

“The exhibition extends the concept of the holiday beyond a perception shaped solely by built form—and thus reduced to architecture—to the home where it began, the mind in which it is embedded, the geography displaced by the holiday setting, and nature, which waits for an opportunity to reclaim the places it has been dispossessed of.”

The exhibition was first shown at Istanbul Modern and then at the TSMD Architecture Center.