On the third floor of İstiklal Avenue's Mısır Apartment, an accounting book offers a portrait of the artist as homo economicus. The economic man has carefully recorded all his expenses from the previous year. He pays his rent; he buys bread; water, eggs, mayonnaise and margarine all leave traces on these pages. The accounting book serves as a diary, and it reveals the most intimate aspects of an artist's life: His struggle to stay afloat, his anxieties as a member of the precariat, his determination to work and complete his artistic series.

Not everyone will be satisfied with the result. "Diary of Defeats," Eşref Yıldırım's third solo show, is a minor exhibition. The ambition of its theme raises expectations that are quickly defeated. But perhaps that is intentional, and Yıldırım has shaped the show around certain sensibilities and themes in the manner of a poet rather than a novelist.

"My passion for poetry predates my passion for painting," Yıldırım said in an interview last week. "And so, after I started painting and producing contemporary art, this old interest began to shape my artistic themes. Initially, I made portraits of poets, and Turgut Uyar was one of them. And my first installation was a weaving that I produced with influence from another Turgut Uyar poem."

Yıldırım studied Uyar's poem "Diary of Defeats" for a long time. "Until this exhibition, my works explored poetry as a structure on its own, rather than dealing with its more personal connections. For the first time in this exhibition, the issue became personalized." Yıldırım started writing his own "Diary of Defeat," which became the first work for this exhibition.

This work features an unsettling narrative woven onto acrylic rope: There is something morbid about it, and I sensed the dread of someone contemplating suicide. The words interrogate the concept of defeat and our reaction to it: Does defeat bring us to the starting point or does it leave us somewhere worse? How do we get back on our feet?

"Every diary has its own system," Yıldırım said. "You need to decide which tools to use, which paths to take from the outset. Then you need to find a departure point inside your self-imposed boundaries. To define it broadly, I think a diary is a collection of records kept during a specific period of time and through a certain order."

In the age of social media, diaries had become collective affairs, and Yıldırım is interested in the transition.

"Works in this exhibition are my personal diaries," he said. "It is difficult to make a distinction between events that occur exclusively in my own life, and those public events that affect us all. I asked others to keep diaries because I wanted to see if the blurring of the line between the personal and public was something experienced collectively or only by me."

"Social media has completely transformed the practice of keeping diaries. We don't have the kind of private diaries we had in the past anymore. But our social media feeds have turned into public diaries for those who browse our feeds. If Van Gogh lived today, he would probably write his diaries on social media, rather than making them parts of his letters to his brother. This way he would reach more people and get instant feedback to his troubles."

While producing the show, Yıldırım worked closely with Zilberman's curatorial team and in the course of numberless meetings, found himself in the peculiar position of producing an exhibition on poetry.

"Yıldırım's works are based on media representations that point out loci of social/political power and social taboos that shape the society," Zilberman's curators write. "They focus on individual lives that are under the oppression of social hierarchies, established gender roles and racism. Yıldırım's artistic practice is founded on his consistent dialogue with painting, his use of recycled materials and his practice comprising various mediums such as installation and performance."

Yıldırım was trained as a painter. "I still paint but also produce performances and video installations," he said.

"I use acrylic rope frequently as an artistic material. I also have an obsession with artist books. The effects of these can all be seen in the exhibition. The use of sound is a novelty here. I also used it in ‘The Prison of Small Crimes,' but here it has a different function. In "Balance Sheet," for example, I use a montage of found recordings."

"I Can't Stand the News," an impressive video installation, depicts the artist taking refuge from the constant noise of public life in nature.

"Social media feeds, as new diaries of our age, have changed us in terms of content," Yıldırım said. "The fact that they are not private anymore caused this transformation. With these new diaries, we want to be in constant interaction. This stops us from sharing things we believe will not be relevant to others. When we kept private diaries, we addressed ourselves; now it is all about ‘sharing' our thoughts with others."

We are surrounded by a constant feed of news; stories and images we see online too often determine the mood of our days. "We are reduced to being spectators of a world where safe spaces no longer exist," Yıldırım said. "There is no escape from this world, and we can't alter the course of things. We watch everything from our seats as spectators. If we were to continue keeping diaries in traditional ways, we could no longer write only about our own lives. And this is what this exhibition is about: Our lives are no longer just our lives."

Yıldırım believes in the importance of taking refuge in nature. "However, it's not possible for an individual with an Internet connection to avoid the constant stream of news of violence," according to the exhibition text. "Basing his paintings on some selected news images, Yıldırım does not only create a personal visual diary, but also emphasizes the public nature of our lives by overlaying these paintings on the image of the forest where he takes daily walks."

Yıldırım said he conceived the show at a crucial moment of his life. "I felt defeated, and I decided to weave my thoughts and observations," he said. "I thought the slowness of the act could prove transformative."