Middle Gate

This series of 20 hotel signs was inspired by the many photographs Alptekin took during his night-time walks around Istanbul during the early 1990s. He initially took photographs of hotel signs in the Tarlabaşı and Laleli districts of Istanbul, which had seen rapid transformation due to the influx of migrants from places such as the Ex-Soviet Republics, Iraq, Iran and Eastern Turkey. Alptekin saw these rather basic hotels as part of a new feral underbelly in society, symptomatic of the more makeshift forms of economic globalisation appearing in Turkey after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Adopting the names of cities elsewhere, these hotels were transitory spaces for first-generation post-Soviet businessmen, backpackers, salesmen, prostitutes, or those waiting for papers to enter Western Europe. Their names offer a superficial dream of a distant place, yet in reality they were extremely ramshackle. The title of these works reflect philosopher Jacques Derrida’s writings on the relationship between ‘hospitality’ and ‘hostility’, as two inextricably connected notions. Alptekin carefully designed the name and style of each sign before they were handcrafted by local sign-makers in Istanbul.