Between Care and Violence – Dört Ayaklı Şehir

Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul

Research and Archive Project:
Mine Yıldırım

Project Assistants:
Uğur Ceylan, Zeynep Sarı

April 16 – August 10, 2025
Salt Beyoğlu

“Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul,” a research and archive exhibition by Mine Yıldırım, was presented within the framework of “The Lives of Animals,” curated by Joanna Zielińska.

The exhibition sheds light on Istanbul’s complex and tension-filled relationship with its street dogs, spanning from the 1910 Hayırsızada Incident to the present day. Through archival documents, photographs, caricatures, newspaper clippings, municipal reports, and personal testimonies, it reveals the multilayered history of Istanbul’s dog-purging policies.

Exploring periods from mass exterminations and forced displacements to shelter policies and sterilization campaigns, the exhibition follows the fraught line between care and violence. This archival research approaches the struggle for dogs’ right to life not merely as an animal issue, but as one intertwined with urbanism, ecology, human–animal relations, and social memory.

Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul examines the politics of dog-purging from 1910 to the present through four main chapters, tracing the discourses, emotional regimes, spatial politics, administrative and legal processes that surround the dogs’ unique, vulnerable yet resilient bodies—bodies caught between care and cruelty. Following the rupture of care marked by the Hayırsızada exile, it uncovers shifting forms, practices, spaces, and emotional dynamics of violence against dogs.

The “chapters,” which encompass key turning points that reshaped dog-purging policies, resist a linear or progressive narrative. Instead, they present overlapping, intertwined dynamics that expose a history woven from continuities, ruptures, and returns — a history of the here and now. By tracing the emotional intensities mobilized by violence against street dogs, the exhibition investigates how imaginaries of care have transformed in response to these affective regimes. It establishes a dual narrative that brings together the changing forms of violence and the evolving politics of care — a counterforce that redefines the conditions under which dogs live and die, the notions of justice and rights that shape these conditions, and the shifting policies of animal welfare and animal rights.

You can read N. Buket Cengiz’s interview with Mine Yıldırım about the exhibition here.