Between the argument and the built thing.

Tuna Kocayurt is a museum and exhibition designer based in Istanbul. The work sits at the point where a curatorial argument has to become a physical sequence — where a claim about history, a collection of objects and a finite floor area are required to agree with one another.

The practice treats these as one problem rather than several. Narrative systems decide the order in which encounters are allowed to happen; spatial thinking decides what that order costs in distance, sightline and attention; semantics decides what the resulting arrangement is actually asserting, whether or not anyone intended it. Separating these into successive phases — concept, then design, then production — tends to produce exhibitions whose rooms quietly contradict their own texts.

Implementation is not the end of that chain but part of it. A detail, a tolerance, a lighting level and a mounting method are semantic decisions arriving late, and they are perfectly capable of undoing an argument that survived every earlier stage. The work therefore stays with a project through fabrication and installation, on the assumption that meaning is not specified in a document but accumulated on site.

Alongside built work, the practice maintains a written line of research into semiotics, interpretation and the limits of visitor cognition — collected under Writing.