1966, Kirchheimbolanden. Lives in Berlin.

Eric Göngrich has been in and out of İstanbul at various intervals since 2000, sometimes staying for up to six months. He has seen and walked more of this city then most of us who have lived here for years. With a background in architecture and a strong interest in how people make and use space, Göngrich works through various media such as installation and photography, and redefines spaces within spaces. In his installation at Antrepo No: 5
he has created a prismatic structure out of wood, evocative of the hills and valleys of İstanbul. The structure is enveloped by visually reduced drawings, slides and projected images of İstanbul. What slowly emerges into focus is that it is next to impossible to create a typology of structures and buildings. The variation of proposals, from mounting pieces of bread on top of each other in a restaurant, to architectures, are awe-inspiring; the divergences from existing models are infinite. As Göngrich has observed in his works about İstanbul before, this city is a place of making space and making structures, from the most miniscule upwards, with an absolute disregard for preceding models and traditions. It is somehow clear that all these – the momentary placement of a thing; a no parking sign made from a cement-filled water bottle with an iron bar sticking out, a scribbled message; an ad hoc addition to a building or an ad hoc cluster of buildings, pavements, windows, and roofs – present a remarkable inventory of what an architect could be, which in this case seems to be Göngrich himself.

Vasıf Kortun

ANTREPO NO: 5