Bedri Baykam’s spectacular exhibition “8 Seconds That Changed the World” opened in İstanbul on the 22nd of November 2013, on exactly the 50th anniversary day of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The show is an artistic representation of a painstaking research into the assassination, a lifelong almost obsessive passion of Baykam’s, and a showcase of an encyclopedic knowledge on the subject. Thanks to a couple of trips to Dallas and New Orleans -where lots of the traces of the assassination and Oswald have been pursued-, numerous interviews with specialists and the study of countless books and films, this exhibition is a real endless but compact information storage about the case.

50 years later, the mysteries persisting around the assassination of John F. Kennedy remain plain for the public. Baykam, on the other hand, has a specific point of view towards the case. He believes in the conspiracy and he has an almost clear understanding of how many shots were fired, from how many sources. He also analyzes the “why's” and “who might have done it's” of the case, diving into the international and internal tensions of the period, between the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, the Cuban and Soviet related missile crisis and the Cold War. Too many sources that hated the President had reasons to eliminate him.

Nevertheless, the numerous attempts to elucidate the reasons and the people behind this crime have all failed. Bedri Baykam's exhibition does not aim to add itself to the numerous books and movies already created about this conspiracy: on the contrary, it aspires to offer the public a whole new approach that includes a variety of different perceptions and emotions through a fascinating artistic work. The spectator finds himself soaked into the unforgettable tragic event of the 22nd of November, filled with the desire to dive into the meander of an unsolved enigma that has not stopped captivating people around the world for more than 50 years.

“8 Seconds That Changed the World” consists of three canvases, a large multimedia piece, a large installation piece and 5 lenticular 4D works. There are also soundtracks and videos. Bedri Baykam innovates his canvases with the lenticular process: the artist has grasped the lenticular process, technique whose material seed has been around for 4-5 decades; He readapted it through a mixture of materials and optical fields through several processes which allow to develop many layers, going sometimes up to 50!