Some places become thresholds where time, characters, and ideas intersect. Pera Palace is one of the spaces where this intersection between East and West is felt most intensely. Through the group exhibition Please Do Not Disturb, nine x-ist artists invite viewers to reconsider figures who stayed at Pera Palace—or are rumored to have stayed there—not through biographical representation, but through the interpretations of contemporary artists. Each work presented in the exhibition emerges not as a direct engagement with a specific name, but as an original creation constructed through the traces, attitudes, intellectual ruptures, and aesthetic codes these figures have left behind. These works can be read as contemporary encounters formed between past and present.
Extending from Agatha Christie’s silent tension woven within enclosed spaces to Alfred Hitchcock’s gaze directed at the subconscious; from the modernisation ideals of Atatürk and İsmet İnönü to Ernest Hemingway’s sharp and restrained language, and Charlie Chaplin’s silent yet universal narrative, this selection opens up a broad conceptual field for reconsidering how historical figures can be reinterpreted through contemporary art.
In this exhibition, where Pera Palace assumes the role of narrator, the viewer is invited not so much to enter a hotel room as to move through a space of encounter where history, memory, and imagination intertwine. Rather than presenting the past as a fixed record, this space creates the possibility of rereading and reconstructing it through the lens of the present.