İstanbul Modern Features Ege Kanar’s Fictional Excavation in 'Panorama: Hayaller ve Yerler'

İstanbul Modern is presenting Ege Kanar’s work 'Approaching an Excavation Site' as part of the exhibition 'Panorama: Hayaller ve Yerler' ('Panorama: Dreams and Places'). The museum described the piece as taking viewers “to the past,” but toward a fictional excavation site rather than a historical one.

According to the museum’s notice, the work centers on a made-up geological discovery in the Chitawa Basin in 1924. That premise frames the piece as an imagined encounter with archaeology and landscape, using the language of excavation to suggest a place shaped by memory, projection and invention rather than documented history.

The inclusion of Kanar’s work in 'Panorama: Hayaller ve Yerler' positions it within a broader exhibition context at İstanbul Modern, where the museum is highlighting art that engages with dreams, places and the spaces between fact and fiction. The museum’s description does not provide further curatorial details about the exhibition’s full scope, but it does identify Kanar’s piece as one of its featured works.

'Approaching an Excavation Site' is presented as a fictional archaeological scene, with the Chitawa Basin serving as the setting for the imagined discovery. The work’s title and concept point to the visual and narrative conventions of excavation, while the museum’s text makes clear that the site itself is invented.

İstanbul Modern’s announcement is brief, but it places Kanar’s practice in the context of an exhibition concerned with place and imagination. The reference to a “fictional excavation site” also suggests a work that plays with the authority normally attached to scientific and historical discovery, without claiming any real archaeological find.

The museum’s note identifies 'Panorama: Hayaller ve Yerler' as the exhibition in which the work appears, and it names 'Approaching an Excavation Site' as the specific piece on view. No additional dates, venue changes or programme details were provided in the source material.