Drifting the Moonlight Across the Waters: A Bosphorus Story

Presented at the Istanbul Bosphorus Museum, Drifting the Moonlight Across the Waters: A Bosphorus Story explored the Bosphorus as a lived landscape rather than a geographical boundary. Bringing together engravings, maps, photographs, and postcards from the nineteenth century to the early Republican period, the exhibition examined how the Bosphorus has been experienced, represented, and imagined through everyday life, movement, and memory. Organised around thematic constellations of looking, dwelling, crossing, and imagining, the exhibition moved beyond a chronological narrative to reveal changing relationships between water, city, and perception. Placing archival material in dialogue with the Bosphorus beyond the museum, it invited visitors to reflect on the shifting ways the city has been seen, inhabited, and remembered.