Which "lifestyle" have you bought?

The Museum’s new exhibition, "The Person You Have Called Cannot be Reached at the Moment: Representations of Lifestyles in Turkey, 1980-2005," highlights the "lifestyles" produced and consumed over the past 25 years. Taking the concept of "lifestyles" as its point of departure, the exhibition retraces and opens for discussion the transformation of Turkish society, during this period, by examining simultaneously the emergence of popular culture imagery, and the socio-economic processes that laid the groundwork for it. Holding up a mirror to both very familiar and very different aspects of our recent past, it beckons viewers to consider the present with a different eye – even as "today" rapidly fades into "yesterday." The exhibition will be on view at the Ottoman Bank Museum, every day, from May 10 through September 17, 2006, between 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m...

Curated by Assoc. Prof. Meltem Ahıska and Assist. Prof. Zafer Yenal and designed by Bülent Erkmen, the exhibition focuses on events, objects and people that were part of the iconography of those times, and the representations of various lifestyle models through advertisements, news stories, photographs, posters, film footage, video clips and artifacts. The exhibition is organized under seven headings – "I Need a New Me," "What Oh What Can We Get For Free?" "Seize the Times," "I Was Like Whoa, You Know?" "Connecting People," "No Trespassers," and "Everything Old Is New Again" – inspired from popular song lyrics, ad slogans and everyday expressions of the decades from 1980 to 2005.

On display are images of some of the "novelties," introduced after the 1980s – now an "indispensable" part of everyday life: shopping malls, the meccas of consumer culture; all-inclusive resort vacation deals; credit cards, the virtual sponsors of happiness; the chance games through which a multitude pursue their dreams for the future; balık ekmek [charcoaled fish "sandwiches"], kebap, kokoreç[lamb tripe grilled on charcoal], and other Turkish versions of fast food; the new household appliances meant to save us so much time; and the modern technologies, which though they place everything distant at our finger tips also separate us from our immediate environment.