ONAY AKBAS - POESIE DU CHAOS : Mémoire d'un jardin de thé en Anatolie
Curator, Project Coordinator
15 September – 31 October 2025
For his 40th artistic anniversary, Onay Akbas takes over the façades of the Caserne Napoléon in central Paris with a monumental open-air exhibition in collaboration with The City of Paris. Forty large-format panels invite passersby to discover a visual journey born from the humble gesture of sketching on tea garden receipts in Anatolia, transformed into poetic narratives and symbolic compositions. Drawing from traditions of shadow theatre, memory, migration, and identity, Akbas creates a body of work that bridges cultures and geographies, linking the streets of Paris with the forgotten corners of Anatolia. Integrated QR codes extend the experience into animated films, deepening the encounter with this visual-poetic archive. By inscribing personal and collective memory onto ephemeral surfaces, La Poésie du Chaos redefines the relationship between art, public space, and shared histories.
There are places that time erases, but whose spirit lives on in gestures.
A man wrote down orders on a small piece of paper, his wrist supple, his gaze elsewhere. It was nothing, and yet everything.
Onay Akbas saw a secret poetry in these gestures. So he asked the owner of a tea garden in Datça to give him the used order slips. Twenty years later, these fragments of everyday life—destined for the trash—become surfaces of memory, fertile ground where images grow.
From the street. In the street. Inside the street.
It is in the street that the artist observes. It is from the street that he thinks. And it is in the street that he exhibits.
The walls of the Caserne Napoléon become the extension of an invisible sidewalk between the shores: those of Anatolia, forgotten tea gardens, to the terraces of Paris, where one also dreams while drinking.
These works are like mental maps, sensitive archives: street landscapes, glimpsed faces, unfinished thoughts, captured in passing.
But here, each image contains something rare: a memory that does not seek to be frozen, but to circulate.
Drawing on a receipt is to reject the hierarchy of media. It is to inscribe the intimate on the ephemeral. It is to make art not an object, but an offering—a round trip between oneself and others, between past and present, between cultures.
Deniz DEMIRER—Curator and project coordinator
