As a teenager in the end of the 1990s, Aykan Safoğlu walked to Istanbul High School, passing the "Workers’ Monument" in Tophane Park. Erected in 1973, the sculpture had a decidedly communistic poise, its muscular, masculine figure holding a hammer. In those days, the metaphorical sickle was not a far cry north as the crow flies across the Black Sea. Its artist, Muzaffer Ertoran, had intended the public piece to be a permanent show of solidarity for the over 1 million guest workers who had then emigrated from Turkey to Germany since 1961.

Due to a global oil crisis, 1973 was the last year of that official migrant work agreement, but as many 60th anniversary initiatives showed in 2021, its effects on both German and Turkish society, their multicultural demographics and international politics, are perhaps one of the most impactful in all of Europe, comparable to that of Algerians in France. Not because of its neoclassical Grecian, almost fascistic aesthetic a la Arno Breker, Ertoran’s sculpture ceased to exist by 2016 on account of vandals.

As Safoğlu passed by the "Worker’s Monument" in Tophane, which stood tall in front of the Karabaş Mustafa Ağa Mosque facing the cafes of Karaköy, he took mental snapshots and has since revived it as part of his work, "Reunion" (2022), which is made of puzzle pieces. Splayed and scattered on the floor of SALT Galata’s underground gallery, the work bears traces of his cognitive dissonance, as an eyewitness to the loss of art and memory. The backstory, riveting and relevant, demands a second reading following the mere fragmentation of its image.

After graduating from Istanbul High School, Safoğlu joined the waves of immigrants who have continued to make for the flatland equity of the German socioeconomic promise that so endears the world to its surgically maneuvered postwar state of capitalist success, if only within European moderation. His own story of flight and integration as a foreign national is mirrored in his approach to the conceptual basis of photography, how the evocation of still life is a reflection of movement, not objectively in space, but subjectively in time.

As a matter of fractions

Entering the clean, bare, even stark hall of SALT Galata’s basement exhibition space, austere in its emptiness, the glare of its ceiling lights conjuring its lock-and-key ambiance as a former Ottoman bank vault holding the debt of an empire on the brink of default, a large-scale artwork by Safoğlu hangs suspended on a powder-coated steel structure as part of his "Recess." With digital prints on strips of wallpaper, the piece, "Zero Deficit (In Refusal)" (2020) is a mesmerizing, stereoscopic venture through the grandiloquent collage of national and scholastic bureaucracy.

Safoğlu challenges the linearity of records, specifically that of Germany and its education system, in which the artist navigated the graphs, rulebooks and coordinates of its institutional authority. His voice as an artist is clear throughout the show, which goes between semi-abstract decor and sociological visualization much in the way of the late 20th-century German artist K.P. Brehmer, but the underlying concepts can be opaque, generally speaking, requiring the preparatory homework that local curators like Marcus Graf ask the public to entertain before traversing through the spatiality of its inferred references.

For example, the work, "Angelus Novus" (2022) is silk-screen on hologram paper. Through the practically subconscious resonance of its rainbow spectrums that dance in harmony with the steps of the seer, Safoğlu considers the gesture of a photograph as a chorus of primary elements, which, by their natural motion within a frame, might convey the longings and passions of migration. Beside it, "Depeche Mode" (2022) is slightly more prosaic, reminiscent of high school in the 1990s, its music internalized over analog playback buttons.

Increasingly apt as critical social commentary, Safoğlu’s work, "decrescendo" (2022) culminates toward the production of what he calls "migrant images." The notion that traces of the mechanical imagination might be circumscribed within the human narrative of migration is a common thread in many contemporary artists’ approaches to the idea of provenance or the sources from which things and theories are derived. Among them is Michael Rakowitz, whose food-wrapper mosaics perform the magical act of making lost Iraqi archaeology reappear.

In the series, "decrescendo," framed with aluminum and made translucent through a process of silk-screening, Safoğlu centers on personal items, a passport, a medical document and a pair of basketball sneakers. They are, as its title signifies, the visual echoes of one among so many young people in Germany, uprooted from Turkey, their bodies absent from what remains of their youth. Safoğlu’s reflexive research-heavy piece recalls an installation by DiasporaTürk, "Passport" (2021), which examined Germany’s racialist paperwork for Turkish guest workers.

Looking back from above

The backdrop and veritable centerpiece to Safoğlu’s exhibition conclude the series, "The Sequential" at SALT, programmed by curators Amira Akbıyıkoğlu and Farah Aksoy to evoke the special motifs that have encompassed the lives and artworks of senior millennials among the Turkish art world, including its diasporas and far-flung inspirations.

From a lonely, pandemic-stricken Beyoğlu apartment in the filmmaking of Volkan Aslan, to an Emirati construction site readapted into Deniz Gül’s writerly imagination, the postmodern Levantine archaeology of Barış Doğrusöz, and a regression to Ottoman intellectualism by Fatma Belkıs and Onur Gökmen, and countless other manifestations of creative witnessing, "The Sequential" finishes strong with a video essay by Safoğlu, on his experience with institutionalization through education and immigration in Germany.

In his 12-minute film, "Dog Star descending" (2020), Safoğlu tracks a succession of images across the lens of the camera, and as they pass, ever so deliberately, his voiceover recounts his memories from school. "When mom first visited me in Berlin," he says, "We both went to visit Haydiça, a Greek relative from Istanbul." In the background, the sole of an upturned shoe is stained, as spliced printouts of photos bear the traces of family encounters.

Safoğlu personalizes the multigenerational trauma of the guest workers’ generation and its effects on him, as a young man whose mind is weighed by an inheritance, not of monetary funds but of historical oppression. And he suffers too, as a contemporary artist sensitive to the psychological ruins of the past. His piece is a meditation on the repercussions of international relations, and the compression of time from a modern perspective.

"I ask myself if everything would have been different if the two Prussian warships hadn’t been integrated into the Ottoman fleet," he ponders, as a photograph of what appears to be him flashes across the projected screen, his face straining for a touch of innocence behind clear tape and strips of paper, recombined through an awkward, but captivating reconfiguration of light and darkness. The struggle to see, to understand his story through those around him, through the places he’s lived in, is palpable, as familiar and strange as looking in the mirror.