Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin was fascinated by the difference between the promise of something and its eventual banal reality. This promise could be in the form of the name of a cheap hotel that suggests the experience of a distant place, or the image of a mass product that evokes luxury or exoticness rather unconvincingly. Alptekin was an artist who could see the profound effects global capitalism had on everyday life. For his exhibition Democratic Luxury, I developed a simple graphic system that reflects these ideas, and that also relates to the visual aesthetics of his work.
