There is no allusion to the events of Pamuk’s novel, and yet the slowness of the camera’s tracking movements suggests a shared nostalgic impulse: all must be registered, all retained.

The city appears over-lit, seeming in fact to glow with sourceless light. The fragments on offer here have the camera roaming Istanbul’s streets at night, passing men fishing from a bridge over the Golden Horn, or following a group of wanderers up an alley. Its 83 display cabinets correspond to the novel’s 83 chapters: 13 of them can currently be seen in London as part of this exhibition.īefore entering the room that houses these 13 vitrines, however, the visitor to Somerset House passes through a narrow corridor lined with screens showing sequences from Innocence of Memories, a film by British director Grant Gee which dialogues with, and expands upon, Pamuk’s novel and museum. In 2012, Pamuk opened the Museum itself, in the same district of his home city. Kemal keeps a collection of objects linked to their affair in a house in the Çukurcuma district of the city, the house where Füsun and her family lived, and the novel takes the form of something like a literary guide to that private museum, beginning with a misplaced earring and ending with a characteristically postmodern flourish from Pamuk, who reveals himself to be author-curator some 700 pages later. Their relationship, which stretches over 30 years, is tumultuous and, ultimately, tragic. The novel tells the story of Kemal, a wealthy businessman in 1970s Istanbul, and his love for Füsun, a poor, distant relation. Nowhere is this melancholy given freer rein than in The Museum of Innocence, published in 2008. The exhibition takes its name from the novel by Orhan Pamuk, in whose works Istanbul is a near-constant presence: the Swedish Academy cited Pamuk’s ‘quest for the melancholic soul of his native city’ in awarding him the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. The Museum of Innocence offers the visitor a little corner of 1970s Istanbul, hidden in a wing of Somerset House. The Museum of Innocence at Somerset House, 27 January – 3 April 2016

Author of the museum of innocence