Last autumn, Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, opened its new season with Naked City, the first solo exhibition in Turkey by acclaimed American artist Doug Aitken. Far from a conventional display, the exhibition is conceived as a site-specific encounter—an immersive spatial journey set within the enigmatic architecture of Perili Köşk.

Curated by Jérôme Sans, Naked City spans nearly two decades of Aitken’s multidisciplinary practice, from 2006 to 2024. With works that hover between film, installation, sound, and sculpture, the artist draws us into the fragile rhythm of modern life—its noise and silence, velocity and stillness, its intimate estrangements.

Here, the city is not a subject to be viewed from a distance, but a space to be inhabited. Through shifting projections, luminous figures, and a kinetic sculpture commissioned especially for this exhibition (Ascending Staircase, 2024), visitors are invited to lose themselves in a choreography of movement, light, and architectural echo.

“I didn’t want to walk in and see a series of well-lit pictures on a bright wall,” Aitken reflects, “but rather to open the door and fall into this vortex.” At Perili Köşk, that vortex becomes tactile—windows become screens, staircases become portals, and time feels malleable.

This is not to be missed—not for the promise of novelty, so much as for  the fleeting chance to experience what is seldom made present: artworks that breathe with the rooms, walls, and shadows around them.