From Allegory to Intimacy: Pink, Power, and Presence

Charlotte Schmitz’s Balat at the German Consulate General in Istanbul

Curated by Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu

What happens when intimacy enters a space built for authority?
At the German Consulate General in Istanbul, Charlotte Schmitz’s photographs set bodies against allegory, intimacy against representation. Where stone claims permanence, the images insist on presence, vitality, and lived experience.

Across the room, a woman in a vividly colored dress sits in an ornate horse-drawn carriage, a small child wrapped in blue brocade in her arms. During a guided tour, a visitor asks, “Is this historical?” Schmitz laughs. “No—they’re going to the hammam. People still do that.” The photograph was taken in the Istanbul neighborhood of Balat. It is contemporary, yet it deliberately unsettles expectations shaped by the consulate’s historic setting.

A Practice of Proximity

Schmitz recalls how the image came about. While photographing a wedding hosted by one of her families in Balat, the resulting images generated such enthusiasm that other residents invited her to photograph them as well. Curator Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu notes that the project unfolded collaboratively over more than a decade. “The closeness that emerged,” she says, “is unique.

The photographer moves quickly from image to image. A small white dog sits in the arms of a child. “She’s grown up now,” Schmitz remarks. In the book Balat, produced with Akseloğlu, she reflects on how she grew older alongside the people she photographed. The project began with Büşra, whose father approached Schmitz in a teahouse, speaking hesitant German—he had once lived in Berlin. He invited her home. Büşra’s pink bedroom became the first private interior Schmitz photographed and the beginning of a long friendship.

Balat unfolds as an exhibition about women and friendship, about trust built over time. The photographs trace lives shaped by early marriage, motherhood, and family responsibility. The women come from Roma families, are Kurdish, Islamic-conservative, or secular. Many images are made inside homes, among cats, dogs, and caged birds. Some feel spontaneous; others are carefully staged. A woman wears a cosmetic face mask; nearby, a girl in a headscarf holds mandarins over her eyes. The images feel intimate, animated by the pleasure of making them together.

Pink runs through the exhibition as a visual constant. The word Balat glows in pink neon above the entrance staircase. Rose-colored frames holding playful portraits sit beside the bust of Emperor Wilhelm II.

A Pink Caesura in an Imperial Hall

The dialogue peaks in the Kaisersaal. A large photograph of a Roma wedding celebration hangs high near the ceiling, a pink-saturated scene of movement, laughter, and excess. The women are not presented as folkloric figures but as authors of their own spectacle. The contrast with the hall’s monumental solemnity is not decorative; it shifts authority. Color, bodies, and motion overlay the imperial setting and recast the room.

Schmitz’s visualizations are not the product of research alone, but of friendship. They reject documentary proof in favor of participation. Balat itself is a neighborhood shaped by layers of history: once a center of Jewish life, later a point of arrival for migrants, now under pressure from gentrification. Rather than offering sociological diagnosis, Schmitz constructs a counter-archive of the everyday. The photographs preserve what urban transformation often erases: care work, neighborly bonds, intimacy.

Formally, the images move between chance and choreography. Pink dominates—dresses, frames, neon letters. Within the consulate’s imperial interiors, it functions as an affective disturbance. This is not an addition to the space, but a displacement. The authority of the building begins to falter.

Photos of the opening: Ceren Saner

Care, Color, and Counter-Archive

The exhibition is not open to the public. It can be seen only through private guided tours—a regrettable limitation given the strength of the work. Its significance, however, gently reframes this constraint. At the opening, many of the women portrayed were present in person, moving through the diplomatic floors. In a building defined by protocol and historical distance, their presence registered as a quiet, almost imperceptible shift. It is precisely this shift that curator Deniz Akseloğlu describes when she observes:

• “In this work, counter-memory performs a subtle reordering—not through opposition, but through soft pressure. Care leans against authority, kinship holds against erosion, representations of women are unfastened from their symbols and returned to lived bodies, and the quiet choreography of everyday relations persists despite the social, cultural, and political forces that seek to fragment them. What emerges is not a conclusion, but a beginning—an opening that continues beyond the frame of the work.”

The collaboration between artist Charlotte Schmitz and curator Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu unfolds as a shared practice of counter-archiving. Both work with photography and moving images as time-based, relational forms attentive to space, duration, and the ethical position of those portrayed. In projects such as Schmitz’s long-term participatory portraits of women in a brothel in Ecuador, photography is framed as an act of agency rather than extraction. Akseloğlu’s practice—shaped through projects such as A Pillar of Smoke, commissioned by the Les Rencontres d’Arles International Photography Festival—approaches photography as a contextual language in dialogue with exhibition space. In Balat, these approaches converge without spectacle, producing a counter-archive grounded in proximity and mutual presence.

The consulate is scheduled for renovation and rethinking in the coming years. Balat already reads as a test case: a proposal for how an imperial memory space might be transformed through contemporary art. Change here is neither loud nor spectacular. It unfolds through proximity and care. Postcolonialism not as an indictment, but as a practice. Feminism not as a slogan, but as a lived relation. For six months, the consulate becomes a place where history is not merely displayed but gently reworked.

The book Balat is a carefully crafted limited edition that brings together exhibition photographs and a personal text by artist Charlotte Schmitz, reflecting her many years of connection with Balat and the people she portrays. Curated by Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu, the publication unfolds as an artwork in its own right, extending the intimacy of the project beyond the exhibition space. It is available in selected bookshops in Türkiye and through Charlotte Schmitz’s website.

Exhibition, Balat, German Consulate General Istanbul, 23 /09 / 2025 – 08/03/2026

Artist: Charlotte Schmitz

Curator: Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu

Design: VenAmiga

Consul General: Dr. Regine Grienberger

Cultural Attaché: Katharina Dolezalek