The Fifth Window: The Realm of My Childhood

The Fifth Window: The Realm of My Childhood was conceived as a return to Tuzla, the city where I was born, after years of living and working between different cities and countries. The title refers to Tuzla as both the first and the fifth window — the point of origin and the place to which the experiences accumulated through Belgrade, Rome, Istanbul and Ankara return.

At the centre of the project is the artist’s book The Realm of My Childhood, structured through twenty-six pages corresponding to twenty-six years since the interruption of childhood. Photographs, drawings and layered images bring together two parallel temporal realities: the childhood world that disappeared and the life that continued afterwards. Rather than reconstructing the past literally, the work approaches memory through fragments, overlaps and moments of disappearance and reappearance.

The window continues to function as a threshold between interior and exterior, past and present, here and elsewhere. Through the artist’s book and its expansion into the exhibition space, different cities and periods coexist within a single visual structure. The Fifth Window brings together questions of place, movement and perception that had developed through the earlier Istanbul and Ankara projects, while returning them to their earliest point of departure: the city of childhood.