Le jeu d’un destin

Urban economics at street level lies at the heart of Mikaïl Koçak’s practice. Scattered across several shop windows in the city center, his intervention builds on a shared observation: the multiplication of empty shops, soaring rents and increasing tax pressure.

His installation explores the mechanisms that transform the city center into a space of transit rather than a place to live. Through this fragmented occupation of windows, the artist reveals often abstract logics: loads of intermediaries, taxes and commissions (small or large) that condition the circulation of goods, bodies and services.

These issues are addressed through the distortion of language and play that usually lie at the core of Mikaïl Koçak’s artistic work. He appropriates both familiar expressions and popular forms of entertainment to develop a narrative that fluctuates between playful humor and a critique of a dysfunctional situation.

For beneath humor emerges a political reading: that of a system in which everyone claims their cut, from the city to the property owner, from the owner to the shopkeeper, and ultimately to the end consumer. Mikaïl Koçak more broadly questions structures of intermediation that have become indispensable, but also organize, and sometimes lock down, the access to resources. Small and large commissions punctuate our everyday life, embedding themselves in all sectors and fields.

Mikaïl Koçak implicitly transforms empty shop windows into speculative platforms. Midway between laughter and unease, his installation invites us to look differently at the economic mechanisms of a city conceived more for transaction than for proper use.