MEMENTO: Latin Istanbul Carved in Marble
Sep 27, 2025
Oct 12, 2025
Open daily 11:00 - 17:00

Mustafa Seven
Visitors are required to register by selecting an available time slot. Entry will be regulated to ensure the safety of the venue and the preservation of its historical integrity.
Mustafa Seven's MEMENTO: Latin Istanbul Carved in Marble exhibition documents the Feriköy Latin Catholic Cemetery, hidden behind high walls in central Istanbul, as the last witness of a multicultural memory. The title, meaning "Remember" in Latin, emphasizes the effort to make visible the traces of a community facing oblivion. In his 30-year photography career, Seven has produced work in the fields of press, documentary, and street photography. Over the past decade, he has been focusing on social memory and identity issues in his documentary photography practice, archiving stories of Istanbul's minority communities.
In the MEMENTO series, Seven reads the silent testimony of Latin Catholic minorities—Levantines, Syriacs, Chaldeans, and other Catholic communities—who have been integral to these lands for centuries, through marble tombstones. The gravestones bearing Ottoman, Latin, French, and Armenian inscriptions carry fragile traces of a multilingual past, while hiding traces of migration, war, modernization, and searches for belonging. Seven's photographs offer silent testimony not only to the dead but to languages, cultures, and vanished lives, emphasizing remembrance's power to carry existence into the future at a time when forgetting accelerates extinction.
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