1956, Munich. Lives in İstanbul.

One painting by Lukas Duwenhögger hangs in Paulina Olowska’s salon in Deniz Palas. Motivated by childhood experiences with a Turkish architect and construction workers, Duwenhögger became a resident of Istanbul. The painting’s title is Sunday Afternoon. In it, lingering memories of Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, where remnants of a popular culture in ruins uncomfortably interfered with a reprisal of modernist promises, form a continuity, at once discomforting and erotically inviting, with the exposed socialist vernacular after the fall of the Wall and the retrieval of resemblances within the migratory aesthetics of Republican and Arabesque Istanbul.
Three men in various states of undress sit in a workers’ shed, beautified by a wall carpet and a spotted curtain in red, green and white. One of them is working on an embroidery. The atmosphere is hard to place, at once relaxed and tense. Through a window, another kind of architecture looms – an unadorned, hermetic battleship of a house. Notions of inside and outside, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’, future and past are poised in a perilous balance.

Charles Esche

DENİZ PALAS APARTMENTS