Eugène Guillevic, Terraqué, 1942
“There is someone in the wind.”

Phantom Quartet brings together Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s newly produced works for this exhibition, along with a selection of earlier works, some drawn from the Arter Collection. The exhibition traverses the artist’s core engagement with the notions of invisibility, cyclicality, memory, architecture, the city and nature through her personal past rooted in the two neighbourhoods surrounding Arter – namely Kurtuluş and Tarlabaşı –, and through the ruptures inscribed in urban history. Büyüktaşcıyan weaves the traces of these ruptures together with imaginary landscapes shaped by fragments, echoes and voids distilled from her memory. The exhibition thus entwines different times and spaces to construct new narratives.

Drawing on the term ‘phantom limb’, evoking a lingering presence that follows loss and used originally in the medical field, Phantom Quartet unfolds in four chapters – Necropolis, Courtyard, Avenue, and Gaze – which bring the outside into the gallery space. This fourfold structure resonates through the elements of fire, air, water and earth, each seeping into the works in different ways. Interlacing four distinct temporalities – past, present, future and purgatory – the exhibition creates a sensory terrain that summons the ghosts hidden within objects, forms, surfaces, sounds and colours.

Through the materials and the deconstructive form language she employs, Büyüktaşcıyan points to a surface tension and examines both the collision and coexistence of different elements transformed by time. Tracing the imprints of individual and collective memory through textures, sounds and urban landscapes, her works attest to a world woven with dualities such as presence and absence, life and death, body and spirit, erasure and reconstruction. By overturning dominant narratives and modes of seeing, they propose a reverse perspective that enables historical memory, the non-human, and what lies beyond the perceived world to be understood in new dimensions.

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