Hasan Özgür Top’s “Columns and Cracks” speaks through the literal and figurative construction of national myth. During the general elections in May 2023’ the Turkish government decided to dock a brand new drone warship at the quay just downhill from the Haga Sophia in Istanbul. The capsule lays down a path between this mobile temple and the fate-obsessed wounded masculinity of Arabesque music. Together they scale up to national mythology, speedrunning towards its annihilation – a floating fixed point or a column looking like a sedimentary site of historical scarring.

As these columns of deep histories are used as canvases for present-day powers to adapt and weaponize the relation between infrastructure and national stories, they somehow crack up at home. Out of neglect or out of a will from within? Where does the fugitive route open when a paranoid mythological architecture cuts through the total sum of the social?