HALATEK'S ECHO PUTS VIEWERS INSIDE AKM ISTANBUL

You Walk In and the Room Watches Back

The room does not explain itself. Karolina Halatek titled the work Echo, and inside Istanbul's Atatürk Cultural Center it does exactly what an echo does. It sends whatever you bring into the space back at you, delayed and changed. There is no wall text spelling out a concept before you cross the threshold. There is only an open architectural field of light, and your own body becomes the missing variable the piece was waiting for.

Halatek describes the effect as somaesthetic, a word that sounds academic until you are standing inside it. Echo shifts a visitor from looking at a room to being looked at by one. Light, scale and movement converge on a single coordinate, and that coordinate is whoever just walked in. The installation has no subject until someone occupies it. Presence is the material, and Halatek built the whole piece to prove that point rather than illustrate it.

Karolina Halatek Trained Under Olafur Eliasson, Not a Gallery

Halatek is Polish, born in 1985. She studied design for performance at University of the Arts London, fine arts at UdK Berlin under Olafur Eliasson's Institut für Raumexperimente, and media art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She is now a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and a visiting researcher at the Lighting Lab, Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. Her collaborators are quantum physicists, superstring theorists and precision mechanical engineers, not set designers.

That background explains why Echo's own framing reaches for quantum entanglement of photons to describe what happens between two visitors standing in the same field of light, each one a variable that changes the other by simply being present. It is a strange citation for an art installation. It is also exactly the register Halatek works in.

Finally Offline covered a version of the same bet this month, when Felipe Pantone and Etai Drori opened Parallel Practices at Albertz Benda on the premise that kinetic light, not the object holding it, is the actual artwork. Halatek pushes that idea one step further. In her version, the viewer is not just watching the light move. The viewer is the thing being moved.

October 29, 2021. Then Five Days in June.

The building underneath Echo has its own timeline. The original Atatürk Cultural Center opened on April 12, 1969, on the eastern edge of Taksim Square in Beyoğlu, designed by architect Hayati Tabanlıoğlu. It closed for renovation in 2008, was demolished in 2018, and reopened on October 29, 2021, after a 13 year gap, rebuilt by Murat Tabanlıoğlu, the original architect's son. The new complex holds a 2040 seat Opera Hall, an 802 seat Theatre Hall, a Gallery, a Multipurpose Hall, a Children's Art Centre and a design focused library.

Digital Art Festival Istanbul ran June 3 through 7, 2026 across that building, its sixth edition, themed Reimagining as Retelling, organized by Mezo with support from Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism and sponsors Turk Telekom and PASHA Bank. Finally Offline saw the same instinct play out in Venice this year, when Amoako Boafo pressed a Ghanaian lace technique into a Renaissance interior at Palazzo Grimani during the 2026 Biennale. A demolished and rebuilt Istanbul concert hall makes the same argument more bluntly; historic architecture is never a neutral box for new work.

Turrell Sculpts With Sky. Halatek Sculpts With You.

James Turrell spends decades on a single work, cutting apertures into a volcanic crater so that sky becomes the material and architecture becomes the instrument that holds it still. Finally Offline covered Turrell's 100th Skyspace opening at ARoS Aarhus earlier this summer, a permanent installation built to outlast its architect.

Halatek works on the opposite clock. Echo existed for five days. Her practice is built from pieces that arrive, hold a room hostage, and leave: Terminal, an installation drawing on testimony from people who reported experiences at the edge of clinical death, shown in Gerlingen in 2016 and again in Tirana in 2024; Halo, a luminous ring built for an artist residency in Chengdu; Relic, a pyramidal form releasing light and fog in 2023; and Ascent, a spiraling light and fog installation in 2022. Where Turrell waits for geology to cooperate, Halatek negotiates a festival slot and a load in date. The ambition is identical. The timeline is not.

One more Turkish name fits here. Refik Anadol, born in Istanbul, built Living Arena, a data driven light piece commissioned by the Los Angeles Clippers for the Intuit Dome screen, proof the format now sells to sports arenas as readily as it sells to culture ministries.

Judge Echo By Who Is Standing Inside It

Echo ran five days inside a hall that did not exist in its current form until October 29, 2021, and it staged an idea Halatek has now tested across four countries: that a viewer standing still inside a field of light is not a passive audience but the last unfinished part of the artwork. She is not yet a museum name the way Turrell is. Her collaborator list, physicists and lighting researchers rather than dealers, suggests she is not building toward one in the usual way either. Digital Art Festival Istanbul gave her five days and a rebuilt landmark. What she did with them was hand the work over to whoever walked in.