Pier Exhibitions - Coast City

5 September – 10 November 2025 Bahar Oganer – Metehan Özcan & Emre Yıldız Kendine Ait Bir Oda (KABO) is pleased to host the Coast City exhibition as part of the Pier Exhibitions, the public art series held at Karşıyaka Ferry Terminal. Coast City brings together two distinct artistic approaches by three artists to İzmir’s coastal geography and urban memory. Bahar Oganer’s I’m where want to be series and the Familiar project by Emre Yıldız and Metehan Özcan focus on İzmir’s coast city identity through a broad perspective ranging from the visible surfaces of the city to individual experiences. Oganer creates an inner realm based on the coastal landscape, while Özcan and Yıldız embark on a typographic journey through street-level architectural signs.

In Bahar Oganer’s I’m where want to be series, İzmir’s coastline is not merely portrayed as natural beauty but conceived as a carrier of collective memory. In contemporary art practices, the coast at times serves as a critique of migration, displacement, and urbanization, and at other times becomes a space for individual freedom, walking, and imagination. Oganer’s monochrome İzmir coastal landscapes, centered around colorful self-portraits, present imagery that lies at the intersection of individual existence and the present day—blending personal, poetic figuration with the energy of İzmir’s coast city, creating an emotional convergence of solitude and modern urbanity.

In their project Familiar, the duo Metehan Özcan and Emre Yıldız focus on the design details of apartment buildings in Karşıyaka. Their graphic readings of the nameplates and symbols that give these buildings their identity shape a visual archive reflecting design culture. Through years of research, documentation, and reinterpretation, they build a narrative based on familiarity. Özcan and Yıldız explore “what is familiar” through professional graphic analyses while discovering new intersections with the daily life of local residents who inhabit those buildings.

Emre Yıldız researches apartment nameplates within the context of design history and typographic culture and carries out applied projects with design students. Metehan Özcan builds a visual archive by photographing these typographic elements linked to vernacular architecture.

Coast City invites a multilayered reading of İzmir’s coast city identity—through two different approaches, from the visible codes of urban space to the inner geographies of individual experience. Here, a visitor-facing figure’s inner voice and the city’s graphic memory coexist side by side.

Hosted by Kendine Ait Bir Oda (KABO) and initiated by İzmir Metropolitan Municipality’s Department of Culture and Arts and İZDENİZ, this exhibition is part of the second edition of the Pier Exhibitions curated by Esra Okyay. Coast City can be visited free of charge every day from 5 September to 10 November 2025 at the Karşıyaka Ferry Terminal.

@kendineait1oda

Bahar Oganer

Born in 1980 in Ankara, Oganer graduated from the Department of Painting at Dokuz Eylül University Faculty of Fine Arts in 2008. In 2010, with a scholarship from İKSV, she continued her painting studies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her work, particularly figure and surrounding nature depictions, stands out for its romantic and longing expression and develops an emotional and poetic narrative primarily through the female figure.

Emre Yıldız

Born in 1980, Yıldız is a graphic designer and academician. He teaches Typography, Printmaking, and Design History and leads interdisciplinary design projects. Based in İzmir, he works across art and design disciplines and co-founded the NomadMind platform, through which he organizes seminars, publications, workshops, and exhibitions locally and internationally.

Metehan Özcan

Trained in interior and visual communication design, Özcan primarily focuses on city and spatial-scale design projects. He continues to photograph and archive typographic elements of vernacular architecture connected to modernist design and collective memory. He blends technical, promotional, and archival images to craft layered narratives.