Art On Istanbul presents “Patina”, a major retrospective bringing together ten years of work by Oddviz, on view at the gallery’s Piyalepaşa space from 12 September to 31 October.
Focusing on Oddviz’s decade-long practice of digitally archiving the public surfaces of cities through photogrammetry, “Patina” traces the evolution and transformation of the artist collective’s practice over the years. Beginning with the documentation of individual pieces of street furniture in the Inventory series, their work has gradually expanded to encompass architectural façades, coastlines, and entire urban fabrics, developing into an extensive visual archive that records the material memory of cities. The retrospective brings together significant works from the past ten years, including pieces on loan from private collections, alongside new works presented for the first time. Moving across different geographies—from the waterfronts of Istanbul and Basel to the layers of graffiti in Berlin and the dense street life of Bangkok—the exhibition draws attention to the constantly shifting surfaces of cities and the material memory that accumulates upon them.
The exhibition takes its title from “patina,” a term describing the traces left by time on material surfaces. Within Oddviz’s practice, however, the concept takes on a broader meaning: layers of wear, repair, intervention, and use accumulate over time, transforming living urban surfaces into a shared memory that records the continuity of public life.
Oddviz’s ten-year practice is precisely an exploration of this process of transformation. Recording the traces that everyday life, use, and time leave upon the city, the collective employs digital technology not simply as a means of documentation, but as a method for rethinking urban memory. Bringing a decade of work together within a single conceptual framework,
“Patina” approaches the city not as a finished and static architectural structure, but as a living surface—one that is continually worn down, transformed, intervened upon, and reconstructed. “Patina”, Oddviz’s retrospective spanning ten years of artistic practice, is on view at Art On Istanbul Piyalepasa from 12 September to 31 October.
