"There are no tyrannies that would not try to limit art, because they can see the power of art. Art can tell the world things that cannot be shared otherwise. It is art that conveys feelings."

 - Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine 

Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin

Cidade , 1999
Installation , 7.3 x 888.9 x 5.1 cm
neon

Cidade, which is Portuguese for “city”, is a neon text work that uses the poem Cidade City Cité written in 1958 by the Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos. As in the original poem, the text comprises a single sentence in Portuguese with all the spaces between words removed. The work looks to reflect the non-translatability of experiencing a different place, yet foregrounds the language itself in the vivid representational form of neon text.