Mathilde Melek An

Mathilde Melek An (b. 1989, Vincennes/France) received her DNSEP degree in 2012 from École Supérieure des Arts et Médias de Caen/Cherbourg in France. Deeply influenced by the interplay of her cultural identities between Normandy and Istanbul, her artistic practice merges performance, site-specific installations, and collective collaborations. Exploring themes of memory, identity, and multiculturalism, An invites audiences to reflect on experiences of mobility, transition, and cultural transformation.

GEÇMİŞ GELİŞİM

GEÇMİŞ GELİŞİM is a project initiated at the end of 2024 and developed during the SAHA Studio program, located in Block 5 of the İMÇ complex, throughout 2025. Rooted in the archives of a textile company founded by my father in the 1990s—with its offices once situated in Block 4 of the same complex in the early 2000s—the project intertwines archival images with personal photographs I took in 2004 using my first digital camera. The result is an intimate memory in dialogue with the collective history of the site.

Twenty years later, the first phase of the project unfolds as a site-specific installation that revisits this memory-laden building where individual and collective histories converge. This initial installation reassembles disparate fragments, breathing new life into forgotten stories and tracing the marks left by time. It questions the relationship between what still exists, what has been lost, and what is emerging—going beyond a simple act of remembering to offer a narrative journey between reconstructed past and reclaimed memory. It invites an active engagement with memory, proposing a form of re-possession.

Transcending linear time and in constant flux, GEÇMİŞ GELİŞİM marks the first step in an ongoing process of reflection on plural memory—shaped by transmission, transformation, and transition rather than fixed storytelling.