Reysi was born in 1985 in Istanbul. Lives and works in Istanbul.
Reysi Kamhi is, with this series of pencil drawings of the houses located in the Jewish quarter of Dardanelles which have abandoned, eroded and depleted, examining the cases of migration and the memory of places through a community and questioning the recent history of Turkey.
Sometimes the places are abandoned, their function is changed and they
remain empty or they are taken by new owners. In other words a space is filled with a lot of recorded memory. As the main constituent of the city
houses are the homeland and rooting place for the people. With the
“Home and Away” drawings Kamhi asks, through the houses which are left behind by a community, what they represent today. Some of them are seized by nature, some are exhausted, residents of some have changed, some are nearly collapsed; nevertheless, they continue to maintain their presence while all of them remained standing in the streets of the city as a decor or as a surface. Why people change the country or the city they live? And how the houses which are abandoned and empty, become ‘ghost mass’ and to what extent they continue to belong to the art? Artist considering these questions, prefer to exhibit images of houses which have been represented as an extension of the process of remembering triggered by urban encounter, in the Megi Hayim synagogue which is also situated in the Jewish neighborhood and lost its function today, instead of being an eye of a new foreigner, who comes from out of town. Also postcards of drawings spread all over the city to meet with the audience, and they offer a temporal reality to the audience that they can take with them.
