IN ZAFER YENAL’S WORDS

Notions of specific "lifestyles" acquired popularity in Turkey in the decades following 1980. At this time, numerous talks, programs, news bulletins and advertisements centering on or around this concept appeared in various media. In this exhibition, we have attempted to expose the problematic of the "lifestyle" concept as it has emerged during the past 25 years. Consequently, we have focused on representations and interpretations of various "lifestyles" in newspaper and magazine stories, advertisements, caricatures, and in radio and television programs. Over the past 2.5 decades, these representations have acquired growing significance in Turkey, exposing themes related to "the good life," and how these themes are expressed in the public sphere as well as the controversies they engender. The newspaper and magazine clippings, television tapings, radio recordings and different objects on display offer a choice of horizontal or vertical readings. We hope that these readings may convey both the clash of rapid change and highlight continuity where it exists. Perhaps the most obvious consistency that turns up here is the continual reshaping of the "lifestyle" concept, in its relation to individual existence, around the fears, desires and threats of different public spaces. From this perspective, lifestyle debates also expose how the ongoing inequalities, conflicts, and struggles in society are articulated.

Our choice for the title of the exhibition, "The Person You Have Called Cannot Be Reached at the Moment," reflects the fact the person sought in lifestyle representations
is an invention and that these inventions are incessantly remodeled concomitantly with social change.

Preliminary research for the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue took us around a year. The analysis and interpretation of our findings took up another six months. Within the framework of this research, we scanned countless magazines and newspapers in libraries, obtained access to certain radio and television archives and interviewed close to 40 people. This is not to imply that the exhibition is perfectly exhaustive in scope, or that it pretends to summarize all the events of past decades. Nonetheless, I am confident that a "reading" of the various materials assembled for display, will provide insights into the main breaking points and social processes in the post-1980 socio-cultural history of Turkey.