This Peculiar Day

An exploration of the personal psychogeography of Istanbul.

In This Peculiar Day, Ci Demi pairs tightly packed crowds with near-empty streets, to create a visual rhythm that mirrors the city’s own fractured tempo. Through veiled facades, construction zones, and isolated figures, Demi reveals an Istanbul caught between transformation and stasis. Moments of stillness and noise echo off one another, amplifying a quiet tension beneath the everyday. Demi traces the emotional undercurrents of the city; its unease, its beauty, its unresolved contradictions. Istanbul becomes less a place than a mood; restless, uncanny, and deeply human.

Beneath these layered contrasts lies a subtle yet potent political charge. The dissonance between presence and absence (of people, of structure, of order) reflects a broader climate of uncertainty in Türkiye, where authoritarian control clashes with public fatigue and quiet defiance. Faces turn away from the camera, or disappear altogether, mirroring a society where visibility is often met with risk. The visual rhythm of the diptychs underscores a population pushed between surveillance and erasure, participation and retreat.

Without making explicit statements, Demi’s work confronts the psychological cost of life under pressure; where the city itself becomes a stage for both resistance and withdrawal.